Shaping the world: The making of globes (video)

by Abha Malpani on

This is one of those videos you are unlikely to look for yourself, but once you find it, it spurs curiosity and you watch with interest.

In around 4 minutes, this video shows how globes are made in a globe factory. With country borders and place names changing constantly, putting together an updated globe with precision is quite a challenge. The video is the making of a standard desk globe. A bit of Googling and I found that there are hundreds of types of globes these days.

I remember being gifted a beach-ball size desk globe on my 10th birthday. It had a bulb in it and every night before going to bed I would switch-off all the lights, turn on the bulb in my globe, and stare at it with amuse as I turned it slowly. I would then start plotting routes and making up my own adventure travel stories as I discovered new lands. I still have that globe and will never part with it.

I know it’s just a globe. But being able to see the world, topography and all, on a scale (rough) of 1:40 million, is pretty incredible. That’s exactly why it’s worth watching how it’s done. The video lacks details on how they do the technical drawings pre-globe-making, but I imagine you would need a lot more than 4 minutes to explain that.

[Via kottke.org]

Oh, and Happy Halloween!

Eiffel tower to undergo $267 million makeover

by Abha Malpani on

The days of standing in line to enter the Eiffel Tower may be numbered as a $267 million, 10-year plan has been unveiled that will give better and easier access to visitors. Built in 1889, the Eiffel Tower was designed for 500,000 people, today the structure attracts about 7 million visitors a year.

At some point in the future you will be able to reserve a 30-minute slot online, the restaurant will be bigger and cheaper, and there will be a new champagne bar on the third floor. With these changes, they hope to attract not only a larger tourist crowd but also Parisians, and of course increase the Tower’s profit levels too.

Lines to visit tourist hotspots are a major annoyance these days so it’s cool that steps are being taken to cut line-time. The Alhambra and the Tower of London are some of the other places that have done a great job giving people the option of pre-booking their visit online.

Our world in a single moment: 100 pictures, 100 words

by Abha Malpani on

I discovered Ten by Ten about 4 years ago in Benetton’s “Colors” magazine and ever since I’ve logged onto it countless times.

The website gives you an hourly update on what’s happening in the world through 100 pictures and 100 words, all scouted by a program that scans through RSS feeds from BBC, Reuters and NY Times.

The pictures you see appear in order of importance (left to right, top to bottom). The word corresponding to the image tells you something about the photo; click on the image and you can see the top headlines this hour alongside the picture.

So in a nutshell: the website automatically captures an hourly updated image of the world. Benetton’s Fabrica artist — Jonathan Harris — who came up with the idea, calls it Internet Art.

What’s also cool is that from November 2004 till date, you can get the “image of the world” for any year, any day, and any hour.

It beats all the “day in photos”/ “best of week photo” sections on any news-site. Simple, creative, brilliant.

The world prepares for doomsday

by Abha Malpani on

As we work on trying to save our planet, it is disturbing to realize that we are also preparing for the ultimate global catastrophe.

A “doomsday vault” — which is a bombproof shelter dug into a mountain on a Norwegian island in the Arctic Ocean — has been built to store 2.25 billion seeds of important agricultural crops in the world, so that in the face of a global calamity, the world will be able to restart the growth of food.

The vault has already received an initial shipment of 100 million seeds from 268,000 varieties of wheat, barley, lentils and other crops. The $9-million, highly protected vault will keep the seeds cool as well as safe from potential flooding caused from foreseen ice-cap melting, for the next 200 years. More than 100 countries have supported its construction, although its ownership rights are with Norway.

So, in event of political instability, nuclear warfare, an epidemic, or large-scale natural disasters, we need not worry my friends, we and our children, and their children, will have food to survive.

We frequently hear that the world is in peril for many reasons and global leaders are putting their heads together to save the planet. Building such a vault is a smart and practical move but it also underscores the harsh reality that, no matter what we try to do, the world’s destruction is imminent, sooner or later.

Happy Wednesday.

The English Project 2012

by Abha Malpani on

As part of the London Olympics cultural program, the plan is to build a museum tracing the roots of the English language.

In conjunction with BBC and the British Library, the museum will allow visitors to experience physically and virtually (holograms!) the global evolution of the language from when it was a mixed tongue of the Jute, Angle and Saxon tribes, to how it stands today as spoken by 2 billion people around the world.

Although being organized by and in the UK, I’m assuming that it will take into context English spoken as a first language in the US, South Africa and Australia.

I’d be particularly interested to see how the future of English is predicted. Language experts say that because of its global reach, new varieties are emerging and there is a possibility that English will evolve into a family of new languages — like what happened to Latin a thousand years ago.

The idea is not unique and just when I was wondering how is it that this hasn’t been thought of before, I find that it has — but for other languages, not purely for English, and on a much smaller scale.

There’s the Museum of the Portuguese Language in Brazil, the Afrikaans Language Museum in South Africa, and the National Museum of Language in the US that talks generally about world languages.

The English Project sounds like a monster project; one that would involve an extensive amount of research and careful articulation to represent a language that is so boundless today.