Found through my favorite papercraft blog Paper Forest, this site has some great examples of Edo-era (1603-1867) papercrafts that you can download and assemble yourself.
The 8 scenes available for download represent various Japanese port cities: Kobe, Ama, Sakai, Osaka, Wakayama, Maizuru, Hidaka, and Shimozu.
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Driving down the 5 through Oregon, I always was shocked to see a giant 500 foot tall nuclear cooling tower poking up out of the beautiful Columbia River scenery. This, as I learned, was the Trojan Nuclear Power Plan, and on May 21, the cooling tower was demolished.
Ahhh the end of another year. I hope all of you had a safe and sane New Year’s Eve. I don’t really have any smashing top whatever lists of 2005, but in it’s stead, I present to you, the best of The Best Of 2005:
There’s a fascinating article in the SF Weekly covering a 15-month long project at UCSF which has produced what might be the finest portrait of corporate propaganda in America today. Over 7 million documents containing insider information on the tobacco industry’s various tips and techniques on manipulating public opinions and beliefs are now available online through the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library. Spanning decades, including such wonderful techniques as astroturfing, reverse psychology, and just plain downright dirty tricks, the archive contains a wealth of information for anyone researching marketing, public relations, and propaganda.
Read more on Nothing Can Stop Big Tobacco: The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library…
Jared Diamond’s wholistic view on the state of the world today, Guns, Germs, & Steel, is coming to PBS, by way of National Geographic. For those of you who haven’t read it yet, the book takes a look at the last 13,000 years or so of human history to try and answer some of the questions as to why the world is the way it is. He proposes that natural, geographic, and environmental factors are why Europe was able to advance quicker than, say Africa (due to the applicability of technologies across longitude as opposed to latitude, etc.), why the Maori tribespeople overpowered the Maoriori, and other cases of one society winning over another. It’s a very interesting look at how “fate” “destined” the world to be as it is today, and I recommend it to anyone who hasn’t read it yet.
Read more on Guns, Germs, & Steel, brought to you by viewers like you….