Friday morning while I was getting ready to move my bike out for the ride to work, I heard on the radio that there are two men in a boat coming in under the Golden Gate Bridge… from Japan!
My first thought was – “Well, that makes my commute look insignificant!” and the second thought was – “Wait – if I speed up a little bit through Sausalito, I can see these guys!”. So off I went, biking at full speed (not as fast as you may imagine, trust me) up the hill to the bridge, and there they were – they had just passed under the bridge and were surrounded by a small fleet of boats, guys on surfboards and even a news helicopter:
I figured that they would probably go towards the Marina, and I kept an eye on the group of boats while I crossed the bridge and rolled down through Crissy Fields. As it turned out, the timing was perfect:
Meet Mick Dawson and Chris Martin, who in their boat Bojangles just finished rowing across the Pacific Ocean from Japan to the US. It took them 189 days on the open ocean to complete this amazing feat.
Yesterday evening I spent several hours reading through their very entertaining blog Golden Gate Endeavor and it is just amazing to follow along from day to day with their struggles. The Pacific Ocean did not make it easy for them, that’s for sure! The weather was often brutal, and on a number of days the wind and the currents did everything to push Mick and Chris back towards the East.
So Congratulations to the crew of the Bojangles! And thanks for taking us all along on your expedition across the ocean – the blog and the pictures of your adventure are quite fascinating and very inspirational.
This picture is already two years old, but I just recently found that page and thought I share…
Here we have a photo taken of all of us by the HiRISE camera on board of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter – at the time Mars was about 142 million kilometers from Earth, which is comparatively close as these things go. So this is what Earth looks like through a reasonably sized telescope on Mars:
At the very moment this photo was taken, you and everything you own and about a 100-kilometer circle around you fit into one pixel.
I find it always deeply humbling to see all of humanity squished onto that tiny little marble in space that we call home. All of our lives and dreams fit into a 60 by 60 pixel square in that picture above… only 24 people ever made it to the top right corner of that photo – a trip of about 400 pixels – and only a dozen ever landed on the moon. Everybody else has been in the bottom-left corner only.
In photos like these our Earth always looks so incredibly fragile, just a small blue orb, maybe made of eggshell-thin Venetian glass. If you could reach into this photo and hold the planet in your hand, you would be deeply afraid to press too hard, or to let it slip and shatter on the floor…
Looking at this beautiful blue world, it is clear to me how incredibly lucky we all are to be here – the universe is a very violent place and for now we only have this one, small, fragile planet as shelter and home.
Every now and then it is worth to sit back and remember what a beautiful planet we are living on.
This photo was taken at the end of July by a new weather satellite, GOES14, in a geostationary orbit at a distance of 36000 kilometers. You have to click through to see the breathtaking large version of this photo…
Every now and then the Internet reveals something amazing about us and the rainbow of cultures we represent on this planet… Kazumi just now called me over to her computer to look at the video below, and – wow! – that is definitely one of the most amazing things I’ve seen in a very long time!
Mesmerizing and inspirational don’t even begin to describe the art behind this video. And what really blows me away is the confidence and fast, flawless performance of the artist. Check it out:
While walking through Chinatown a couple of days ago, I had this intense flashback – suddenly I was back in Shanghai… in May 1989.
Memories just came flooding back, the smells, the sounds… the view along the Bund through the hazy air, heavy with thick smoke from the ships.
There were the banners, held high.
And the faces. Sweaty excitement in the faces of the young students, many of them looking like they were still in high school.
Bold, colorful characters put down with a heavy brush. White banners. Red characters, rippling in the wind.
The faces, so open, so happy with the sudden empowerment. Shouted slogans filling the air.
Crammed between other onlookers, shoulder to shoulder with thousands of people on the old Garden Bridge. Marching students ahead, coal barges on the water behind. The steel girders of the bridge digging into my back.
So much applause, people clapping in the rhythm of the marchers. Arms raised, fingers pointing at banners.
The infectious excitement of the crowd. Waves of emotion passing through us like the wind through trees. Laughter, shouts, chants picked up by group after group of marchers.
Thanks to MapSkip it’s not really much of a secret anymore that I am permanently fascinated by maps. I always loved to look at maps, trace routes across them, read the foreign-sounding place names… As a young boy I spent many hours traveling across the beautiful, large maps in my parent’s world atlas, imagining myself in all those exotic places.
If you are an unreconstructed map-fetishist like me, you will love this site: strange maps
This site is a treasure trove of very unusual maps with very thoughtful descriptions and I found it to be quite an inspirational place for the tired creative mind.
There’s 192 countries that are currently officially recognized, and this little quiz almost drove me crazy. I thought that I would easily be able to spell out half the countries in ten minutes, but I had 127 countries left at the end of my first try.
The always-excellent PingMag has an article about Iranian Typography that is quite informative and fascinating.
Arabian writing has always fascinated me, especially when it is being used as part of a graphical design treatment. This article has several beautiful examples where the Arabian script is part of the design to the point where graphics and design become one. By the nature of its character strokes Arabian script looks very elegant and allows for expressive calligraphy as I’ve otherwise only seen in some ancient Chinese stone tablets.
While I do not always agree with Jim Kunstler, he writes with a steady, intense passion about what our future without oil will be like. He abhors the suburbanized, mall-ified modern cities that have sprung up all over the United States with their dependence on cars and cheap oil and I fully agree with him that these abominations of city planning will become disastrous, festering wounds for this society once the oil price takes up permanent residency in the four-dollar neighborhood.
Here is an article from a few weeks ago where Jim succinctly creates an arc from the current militaristic misadventure in Iraq, to a collapsing mid-eastern political landscape and on to the destruction of the American Dream.
All of this could be preventable if this society would realize what they have become and that intensive research of alternative energies and new modes of mass transportation are crucial life-or-death items on our collective to-do list.
Four hurricanes in one month hitting the east coast… the first hurricane ever hitting Brazil…. the worst Typhoon season ever in east Asia… the hottest summers ever in Europe… glaciers all over the world are disappearing…
This, my friends, is what they call Global Warming.
You don’t need scientists to crunch the numbers while they take care not to hurt the feelings of the industry paying for their laboratories. You don’t need a clueless journalist promoted for their fabulous hairdo to give you a “fair and balanced” story about it. All you have to do is to search google news for extreme weather and there you go.
It is probably already too late to completely prevent several disasterous decades of extreme weather that will probably kill more people than the black plague and all the wars of the 20th century combined. Think I exaggerate? Imagine your supermarket. Now imagine that same supermarket empty.
Thanks specifically to the Bush administration and their big-oil inspired pissing session on the Kyoto agreement, there is not much good news left in this issue. With each passing day without conservation measures and with each sold SUV, every attempt to turn away from the brink will be so much harder.
Here’s a very good article by Tom Engelhardt of tomdispatch.com about Global Warming and how little we hear about it…
