Diana Kupke Writes
Nineteenth Archive
Items from 2016 to 2018
This beautiful pavilion, made up of brightly coloured pink balloons, came from the imagination of French architect Cyril Lancelin. It would be designed so it could be moved easily between galleries and festivals.
Growroom
All it takes to build this is a rubber hammer, 17 sheets of plywood and a milling machine. Called a Growroom, it has been designed to enable people to grow food locally, and sustainably as water and light can reach all the plants. IKEA has an external innovation hub which came up with the design.
Recycle that plastic now!
How sad is this? The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is made up of plastic particles, chemical sludge, and other debris and is mostly invisible because it has such a low density. The GPGP is believed to be about 386,000 square miles in the size. It is continually growing because we humans continue to dispose of plastic in the wrong manner. It is believed only about 24% of plastics are recycled.
Eat your dinner, eat your shoes
Love sushi? Love shoes? Here is a two-for-one, shoes made from sushi by Milan based chef, Yujia Hu.
Bless you, don't be scared
The 500 year anniversary of the Protestant Reforation was marked by the invention of a robotic priest, the BlessU-2 which is able to speak either as a male or female, and can provide blessings to order. Clergyman Stephan Krebs led the team from the Protestant Church of Hesse and Nasau which created the robot priest. When a person is blessed the robot’s nose changes colour (why?) and the mouth moves, light is emitted from the hands, the arms are raised and the eyes rotate! Could be a very scary blessing.
Even old can be beautiful
I love this photograph which was taken by Dale Mann of Euroa.
Lovely spider!
You can't tell, by looking at this spider, that it is the size of a softball! It is a new spider species called the Califorctenus cacachilensis, or the Sierra Cacachilas wandering spider and was discovered, oddly enough, in the Sierra Cacachilas in Mexico. Researchers from the San Diego Natural History Museum initially found a giant exoskeleton in a cave and, on returning at night, discovered the spider in all its glory.
Dennis White who set a precedent
Dennis White (above), was the first person to use the Infinity Burial Suit. He died in September 2016.
I love mushrooms so my second choice for what happens to my body after death would be to do as Dennis did. The suit is embroidered with thread which contains mushroom spores. As the body decomposes the mushrooms digest away and at the same time they neutralise the toxins in the body. The suit was designed by Jae Rhim Lee and Mike Ma.
Georgeous flowers in a New York Street
Empty garbage bins are being rejuvenated as vases by floral designer, Lewis Miller. The floral extravagances are part of an ongoing project where huge bouquets of mixed flowers and greenery are tempting New Yorkers to go close to the garbage bins they once skirted.
I know absolutely nothing about this shoe but I love keyboards so it called to me.
Pretty crossing
There needs to be more prettiness in life and this street crossing is very pretty indeed. This crossing might be in Madrid.
One Punch! Coward Punch!
Tell that to Muhammad Ali alias Cassius Clay
29 March to 11 June 2016
Many Australians consider the Coward Punch, where a young man kills another by punching him, to be utterly disgusting. Violence doesn't have any place in our society. So how can a man, who earned a fortune from bashing other young men all his working life, be hailed as a hero when he dies?
My frail aged geriatric brain is utterly boggled.
Suffer the little children - give them access to guns
I would hope this story would only reflect the society of one country. So far this year, according to the Washington Post, toddlers in the USA have shot 23 people. We are talking about murderers who are aged under three, and I would hope their parents, who allow guns to be easily accessible, are charged and jailed.
In April alone four toddlers killed themselves with guns, another two shot themselves in the arm, and another toddler shot and killed her mother. To date there have been 77 instances in which a child, younger than 18, has shot someone in the USA.
And during the past five years, also in the USA, six dogs have shot people!
8 February to 28 March 2016
Let's hear it for Ray Tomlinson
You may not know his name, he doesn't prance anorexedly down catwalks, he doesn't destroy music, he has never appeared in a film but it is because of him that you can send an email, at the drop of a hat, to anyone, anywhere.
Ray, who died at the beginning of March, invented email which has been the love of my life for many years. He sent the first email in 1971 and made the decision to use the symbol @ to separate the user and the host.
More than a billion and a half people use emails who send millions of emails in a variety of devices every day.
Ray was also behind the From and Subject fields which are a basic part of every email.
A frog a day keeps the mosquitoes away
The Jerdon tree frog, thought to have been extinct for the past 150 years, has been found in the jungles of north eastern India. The tiny frog breeds inside trees where water collects in the hollows and is fed by unfertilized eggs laid by the mother. The frog was called after Thomas Jerdon who caught two of them in 1870 in the Darjeeling area and then deposited them in the Natural History Museum in London. Most tadpoles have proto teeth so they can eat leaves but the Jerson tadpole has a smooth mouth so it can eat the eggs.
Bubble house
Image by Yves Gellie
This gorgeous house, which reminds me of a similar one in Darwin forty years ago, was designed by Antti Lovag for Pierre Bernard and is in the French town of Theoule sur Mer. His bubble house began with a network of iron, after he had studied the terrain, and this was then covered with concrete. He always lived on the sites of the houses he built, he never knew what the house would be like, nor how much it would cost. He died in 2014 at the age of 94.
Don't hold any truck with art
Photography by Panci Calvo
The delightful Truck Art Project turned a fleet of trucks into mobile works of art. Jaime Colsa, who owns both a transport company and an art gallery in Madrid, has combined his commercial interests to give pleasure to people throughout Spain. Some of the trucks will also house exhibitions which are being taken to remote areas of the country.
Happy New Year!
For all of us!
31 December 2015 to 7 February 2016
Happy new year, tomorrow, February 8 2016, marks the beginning of the Year of the Monkey which continues until January 27, 2017. This is the 4713th Chinese year. The Chinese zodiac has 12 sections of which the monkey is the ninth. You are a monkey is you were born in 1920, 1932, 1944, 1956, 1968, 1980, 1992, 2004, or this year, 2016. Babies born this year are monkeys.
Fascinating church!
This marvellous sign is at the entrance to the German town of Templin. Included in the welcome from a variety of houses of worship is the bottom sign for the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I might find a colander and join.
The following information comes from the website. The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, after having existed in secrecy for hundreds of years, came into the mainstream just a few years ago. With millions, if not thousands, of devout worshipers, the Church of the FSM is widely considered a legitimate religion, even by its opponents, mostly fundamentalist Christians, who have accepted that our God has larger balls than theirs. Some claim that the church is purely a thought experiment or satire, illustrating that Intelligent Design is not science, just a pseudoscience manufactured by Christians to push Creationism into public schools. These people are mistaken. The Church of FSM is legit, and backed by hard science. Anything that comes across as humor or satire is purely coincidental.
One of many
This is one of the many dead bodies on Mount Everest. Living climbers pass the bodies which now serve as trail markers! People continue to climb the mountain although it has claimed more than 200 bodies. There are some weird stories about these bodies, some of whom are known. Why haven't they been removed for burial?
Brain vault
Dr. Vahram Haroutunian is the director of the Mount Sinai NIH Brain and Tissue Repository at the James J. Peters VA Medical Center, in the Bronx. This laboratory stores brains which have been donated to enable neuroscientists to study brain function, mental illness, and degenerative disease.
The brain slices are individually sealed and each freezer, and there are more than 12, holds about 100 donations. There are five of these brain vaults which supply parts of brains all over the world for scientists.
21 November to 30 December 2015
Congratulations to Andrew Suryono who received an honorable mention in the 2015 National Geographic Photo Contest with this delightful photograph. Melburnian James Smart won the contest with an amazing photograph of a twister (as in weather, not dancer).
What is she wearing?
I think Sally, pictured above, is the first feline in Australia to wear a tracker as an accessory. She has given her owners several frights by vanishing for days at a time but now she can be tracked and will never be lost again.
This incredible piece of art, the Spring Dragon Tail, was created for the Shanghai Urban Space Art Season Design exhibition by Philip Beesley who collaborated with the Living Architect Systems Group.
I love this illustration but have no idea where I found it or who created it.
Happy birthday to the world wide web
Andrei Mihai tells us it is the 25th birthday for the world's first website, and no it wasn't Google which didn't appear until 1996.
The first website was set up by Tim Berners-Lee and was used by CERN researchers. It became accessible to those few lucky people with an internet connection later in 1991 and told viewers how to set up their own servers, and how to access documents. The site was text based and was wonderfully free of images and graphics.
We could spend a lifetime looking at websites, today there are almost one billion which give forth to four billion web pages.
I'm a frequent user of IMDB which was hosted by the Cardiff University in 1993 and which continues to this day.
5 October to 20 November 2015
Photograph John Gollings
This beautiful pavilion, designed by Ohn Wardle Architects, is made from 1350 blossoms made from material. It is in homage to the Sidney Myer Music Bowl in Melbourne and hosted numerous live events earlier this year. The commission for the pavilion came from the National Gallery of Victoria.
Guess what this is?
No, it is not a rabbit. It is hard to believe but this is an underwater sea slug, the Jorunna parva. The things that look like ears are scent receptors which help the slug to find food. This creature is tiny, only two centimetres in length.
No prizes for guessing what this is.
And this is exactly what it looks like, a shot glass. It appears the first mention of a shot glass, was in 1913, and one story suggests the name originates from the glass on dinner tables in which buckshot (removed from the meat) was placed.
Gorgeous!
Photograph Marco Fischer
This is the saturniidae moth caterperpillar, found all over the world, but in this case it was photographed in Switzerland. The species found in our country pupate in hard cocoons, sometimes for longer than a year.
1 September to 4 October 2015
Last month I featured a frog found in the Andes and this time it is the Andean Cat which has only been seen a few times. Similar to a domesticated animal, this cat is sturdier, and is endangered with only about 2500 of them roaming the Andes.
Beautiful house in the trees
Above and below are photographs of a beautiful tree top house somewhere near Airlie.
What is this?
This amazing structure is a bus stop built somewhere in the USSR and photographed by Christopher Herwig. Mr Herwig travelled 18,000 miles in the country via bike and bus, car and taxi to document hundreds of bus shelters. It appears most are now derelict but when they were built the construction was happily free of the many restrictions placed on buildings and artwork whereby happy people were depicted.
Beautiful Nebula
A few days ago, while listening to a Margaret Throsby interview, I heard the amazing sound stars make and then I came across this photograph from NASA of part of the Veil Nebula.
On a mission
Mackay Regional Council is determined to move the Mackay Library from its present beautiful position to the wastelands of the city where bitumen and vehicles and exhaust fumes reign supreme. Above is the present parking for patrons of the library, the new parking is a concrete landing strip up in the air totally devoid of trees or grass. Council says the parking will be for library patrons only but parking-poor city workers and shoppers will flood the area.
It's a blue fountain at the community hub which presently is home to the MECC, council building, Food Space and the Mackay Library but the hub will soon lose a spoke when the library is relegated to the city.
And MRC will once more waste ratepayers money in a very big way by turning the Dome (at present offices) into a library, and by turning the purpose built library into offices! Send council workers to the Dome where the offices await and take your horrible hands off the Mackay Library.
I failed, but I tried.
18th archive