It would cost 5 billion dollars and stand twice as tall as its nearest rival.

Sure, the Burj Dubai tower looks amazingly tall, but it’s final height— currently projected to be 2,300 feet— is less than half that of a new building planned for Saudi Arabia. It’s going to be 5,250 feet high. Yup, that’s just 30 feet short of a mile tall: taller than anything under construction anywhere, and making it easily the world’s tallest building. Think they should stick a TV antenna on the top and go for that extra 30 feet? I sure do.

It’s going to be built in a new city near Jeddah on the Red Sea and is funded by billionaire Prince al-Walid bin Talal. He bought London’s Savoy hotel for a cool $2.5 billion in 2005. So you can suspect that there’ll be a hotel in the building somewhere. By my calculations, the tower will have somewhere between 320 and 350 floors, so perhaps that should be “several hotels”.

Not much is known about the details yet, other than the fact that it’ll have two supporting flying-buttress towers to help keep it up (both more than 800 feet high). It will also have advanced damping systems to stop the swaying at high floors from making people sick, and it’s going to need amazing engineering to cope with freezing wind at the top and desert heat at the bottom.

It’s so tall that much of the ferrying of material and construction workers will have to be by helicopter. And that’s just cool.

Mile High: 5250-Foot Tower Will Make Burj Dubai Look Like Pencil

The photographs of Russian chemist and photographer, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, show Russia on the eve of World War I and the coming of the revolution. From 1909–1912 and again in 1915, Prokudin-Gorskii travelled across the Russian Empire, documenting life, landscapes and the work of Russain people. His images were to be a photographic survey of the time. He traveled in a special train car transformed into a dark room to process his special process of creating color images, a technology that was in its infancy in the early 1900’s. Prokudin-Gorskii left Russia in 1918, after the Russian Revolution had destroyed the Empire he spent years documenting.

Color Photography from Russia in the Early 1900’s

I flipped my dreadlocks in front of an exceptional high-speed camera shooting on the low end of its abilities; a mere 6,800fps. k0re happened to be there to record the event in realtime which is great for comparison. I edited it to my song, “Rag Tag Flag”, from my Hooks’n’Heels project.

Slo-mo dread flip A video celebrating spectacular hair — Boing Boing

Papercraft Self Portrait — Art Portfolio for Eric Testroete

More images can be found at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dutchct/sets/72157622591528101/

also see kotaku.com

See more at: Pictures of the Year International 2009 Winners Gallery

via LOOK: Pictures of the Year | GOOD

An interesting new pool table called the Obscura CueLight is making waves for its unique use of video technology to enhance the player’s experience.

Currently set up at the Esquire Ultimate Bachelor pad, the Obscura CueLight is quite an amazing demonstration of technology. It uses sensors and motion detectors to manipulate images as you move the balls around the table. While the table is currently set up to reveal a hidden image, that’s just one potential use of the technology. It can also be configured to trail flames behind the balls, or even project a pool of water on the table that ripples as the balls move over it.

The good news is that the system itself only costs $80,000. It just happens to be mounted on a table that costs $125,000. So the question is, would it work on the $75 table you picked up at a garage sale?

There are a ton of possibilities with this setup.

via ChruchGear — Coolest $200,000 pool table ever

Update: Here is another video with some different effects.

It’s not uncommon for YouTube users to upload videos containing copyrighted music. In fact, it happens so frequently that Google has developed systems to find and disable/mute such infringing videos. Rather then see the potential promotional benefits of fan made videos, record labels have generally claimed these uploads are hurting their profits. Anti-piracy organizations such as the RIAA, BPI and CRIA actively patrol websites like YouTube, searching for infringing content and forcing it’s removal.

In one instance, songwriter Calvin Harris found that a video clip he uploaded himself had been disabled for copyright infringement. The problem content: one of his own songs. As the recording industry seems to be doing similar things all the time, it’s nice to hear of an instance where common sense prevailed… although in this case it’s not the record labels who have seen the light.

Recently a beautiful video of the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium in Japan went viral on YouTube. The clip happened to feature the song “Please Don’t Go” by Barcelona… without their permission. Rather then demanding the video be taken down, the band created a response video of their own, thanking their fans and stating that the situation had actually helped their sales.

“We’re so flattered to learn that it features one of our songs called Please Don’t Go,” Barcelona’s lead singer Brian Fennell says in the video response.

“We want to let you know that it’s been affirming in the last week to watch in the iTunes store a correlation with the sales of our record ‘Absolutes’, growing in the rock charts as a result of having the song placed in the video,” drummer Rhett Stonelake added.

As of today, the video has been viewed over 2 million times, garnering publicity for both the band and the aquarium. It’s great to see an instance where fan videos aren’t always the death of the music industry.

via ‘Pirated’ Youtube Clip Boosts Band’s Album Sales | TorrentFreak.