10 Daily Things

Have you ever seen a piece of mercury thiocyanide burning? Take a look at this video and be amazed. Do not try this at home because it produces poisonous mercury vapors.

The image above show the main desktop with its 7 screens, 9 screens if the two laptops are used. The bricks, by the way, are not real bricks. They are brick textured foam wallpaper. Nice side effect is they dampen and absorb a lot of fan white noise.

The workspace during daylight. The desks are not held up by computers as some think they see. The desks are sturdy metal Projekta electronics workbenches that can be adjusted for height.

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Spiral Island was a floating artificial island in a lagoon near Puerto Aventuras, on the Caribbean coast of Mexico south of Cancún. It was built by British eco-pioneer Richart (or “Rishi”) Sowa beginning in 1998; he filled nets with empty discarded plastic bottles to support a structure of plywood and bamboo, on which he poured sand and planted numerous plants, including mangroves. It was destroyed by Hurricane Emily in 2005.[1] Sowa is building a new island in Isla Mujeres, Mexico.

The original island sported a two-story house, a solar oven, a self-composting toilet, and three beaches. He used some 250,000 bottles for the 66ft (20 m) by 54 ft (16 m) structure. The mangroves were planted to help keep the island cool, and some of them rose up to 15 ft (5 m) high.

Sowa is a musician, artist, and carpenter. Now in his fifties, he is an environmentalist who believes in recycling and low-impact living.

A book about Rishi’s journey in building the original island and his philosophies, titled “Spirologically Speaking” written by the German author Tanja Samed along with Rishi, is due to be released in 2008.

Rishi’s Spiral Island has been featured in a number of newspapers around the world and was featured in an episode of the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! TV show.

Amazing climbing skills from a grandmother in Iran. You won’t believe your eyes!

An NHK camera crew has captured a flying fish traveling through the air for 45 seconds, in what could be a new world record.

The footage was taken on Monday, from a ferry near Kuchino-erabu island in Kagoshima prefecture, southwestern Japan.

The fish flew alongside a ferry that was traveling at roughly 30 kilometers per hour. The fish was able to continue flying by occasionally beating the surface of the water with its tail-fin when its flight height became low.

An expert says the flight time beats the previous record of 42 seconds reported by an American researcher in the 1920s. He says the flight of 45 seconds must be close to the fish’s biological limit, as brachial respiration is impossible while flying in air.