Most Fabulous world of insects

Malaysian Lee Pei Ling (Lee Pei ling) lives and works in Tanzania. He creates an amazing macro photography of insects that look like paintings. To create the effect Lee Pei focuses on the main subject and the background is intentionally blurred. So the beauty of the object and nothing distracts from his contemplation.

China's Tianmen mountain park has a glass walkway!

Glass walkway at China's Tianmen Mountain park.

a glass walkway in china's tianmen mountain national park
all photographs © dingyun juan, courtesy tianmenshan


A new trail path in china's tianmen mountain national park offers visitors an unusual experience:
the floor and rails of the pathway are composed of glass, offering walkers a vertigo-inducing look
at the sheer drops and wilderness below. the walkway spans three feet wide, composed of glass 2.5-inches thick.

measuring approximately 200 feet (61 meters) long, the walkway is raised almost a mile into the air at about 4700 feet
(1430 meters), inviting comparisons to the grand canyon 'skywalk' in arizona, USA. the passage joins the west cliff
at the yunmeng fairy summit, where tianmen mountain and zhang jiajie meet. visitors to the tianmen mountain bridge
are requested to wear shoe covers to keep the glass transparent and clean.



views looking down the 200-foot path



visitors look out over the edge of the cliff known as 'heavenly gate mountain'



a small lookout section

Woman Collects Realistic Dolls, Treats Them Like Real Babies.

Marylin Mansfield, a plus-size model from Staten Island, has turned her home into a creepy nursery filled with over 300 dolls, including reborn babies, Barbies and Goth-like Krypt Kiddies.

Marylin actually treats her plastic collectibles like real babies. ”I take them anywhere you would bring a real baby. I don’t do it for the shock value. I do it for myself because it makes me happy. I just loved when my kids were babies — and these babies stay babies forever. I buy them clothes. They never grow out of them and they never get dirty”, the tattooed platinum blonde says about her peculiar hobby.

Photo: Helayne Seidman/NY Post

“I know they’re not alive, but their facial expressions give them all their own personalities.When women hold babies, they release hormones. I think that’s what it is for me — it makes me feel good”, Mansfield is quoted by the New York Post. The mother of three real children has around 300 dolls in apartment, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Her collection includes reborn babies that look, feel and weigh just like real toddlers,  Barbie dolls, creepy “Living Dead” dolls and Goth-themed “Kreepy Kiddies”. She treats them all like real-life babies, washes them, changes them and never leaves the house without one.

Photo: Marilyn Mansfield/Facebook

Believe it or not, her real kids aren’t at all jealous of their mother’s attention towards her dolls. On the contrary, her young boy was inspired to start his own collection, and her 12-year-old daughter helps the platinum blonde wash and change her precious dolls. The husband doesn’t feel the same way about dolls as Marilyn does, but he’s gotten used to their enlarged family.

Photo: Marilyn Mansfield/Facebook

Mansfield, who was featured on the TLC hit show My Collection Obsession, says the lifelike appearance of her dolls attracts strangers’ attention every time she goes out with them. She gets all kinds of reactions out of them, from the usual ’How old is he?’ to Your baby looks a little pale. Is he OK?”. Most of the time she just ignores them but if they persist, she lets them know it’s not a real baby.

World’s largest horns!

MOUNTAIN HOME, ARK – A steer named Lurch is going in the record books for having the world’s biggest set of horns:  They’re more than 3 feet around!

Lurch’s horns are a whopping 37.5 inches in circumference, which shatters the existing record of 31 inches. Those numbers have earned him a spot in the next Guinness of Records, says human pal Janice Wolf.

He’s made worldwide headlines with his record-setting horns, and she hopes the attention will pay off in the much-needed funds for her animal-rescue organization.  She’s the founder and sole operator of the Rocky Ridge Animal Refuge, which saves sick and abandoned animals and tries to find homes for them.

Lurch was actually a late bloomer, says Wolf.  His horns started growing much later than normal.

“his horns grew very slowly,” she recalls.

“I used to worry that he wouldn’t have any!”

Glass Beach Fort Bragg

There is one very interesting place - Glass Beach (Glass Beach, Fort Bragg, California, USA). In the early 20th century this beach was a big dump. In the sixties the landfill was closed, and various cleanup programs were undertaken through the years to correct the damage. Over the next several decades the pounding waves cleansed the beach, wearing down the discarded glass into the small, smooth, colored trinkets that cover the beach today. Since then, the place has become popular and best tourism place for the tourists.

 

Microsoft launches its social network to compete with Google+

File this in the "we-try-it-out-so-you-don't-have-to" category. So.cl is a derivative social network that may be useful to students, but it won't fly elsewhere.
Over the weekend, Microsoft quietly launched an experimental social network called So.cl. It's a mix between Google+ and Storify. Users are encouraged to search for information about a particular topic, then compile the best results - textual content, images and videos - into a single post. So.cl is initially targeted to students. It may end up being useful to that market, but it's unlikely to get traction as a mainstream social network. Here's why...

Microsoft is calling So.cl "an experiment in open search," in that anything you search for on the network is viewable by other users and made available to third party developers. That description makes it sound like a direct competitor to Google+, which was Google's attempt at combining search with social networking. It certainly has similarities, but So.cl is ultimately an academic tool moreso than a social one.
To get started, you can sign up using either your Facebook or Windows Live profile. Microsoft had little choice but to leverage Facebook's social graph, given that hardly anyone uses Windows Live (Microsoft's ID platform). Sure enough Facebook gave me a good leg up into the So.cl network, giving me over 50 people to follow.

The Features

When it comes to using So.cl and finding value in it, the flaws become obvious. The Storify-like aggregation feature in So.cl is nifty, but everything else has been done before in hundreds of other social networks: posting, commenting, tagging, liking, sharing (two options: to Facebook or email!).
The attempts at innovation in So.cl seem forced. An option labeled "riffing" is supposed to be "a new way to interact and improvise with content" - but in reality, it simply means to re-share a post and optionally add your own comment or content.

It is nice that you can add extra content to a post and I can see this being useful in an educational setting; for example a student in a science class adding more data to a thread about an astronomy topic. But this isn't something people need or want in a mainstream social network. When it comes to re-sharing, all most people want to do on a social network is paste that inspirational quote or solar eclipse photo to their profile page - so their friends can see it too.
Another noteworthy feature in So.cl is something called "video parties." This is basically a video playlist with a chat area - kind of like YouTube's playlists. It's probably the most innovative feature in So.cl, but that isn't saying a lot. The reality is that Facebook or Google+ could easily replicate it, if they wanted to.

The Verdict

So.cl is a largely derivative product and there's no way this is going to go mainstream. What slim chance it had to capture the imagination of a public that is already using Facebook (and may or may not be playing around with Google+), was dashed with the decision not to have a mobile component. As Robert Scoble rightly pointed out: "we're in the post-PC world now. Why didn't you start with just working on mobile? That would have been at least interesting."
I can see why So.cl is PC focused, with its reliance on aggregation and multimedia elements like "video parties." But that doesn't change the fact that any social network launching in 2012 that isn't mobile-based, is most likely doomed to fail if it wants to reach a mainstream audience.
So.cl comes from Microsoft's FUSE research group and the resulting product shows its academic roots. It may become a useful tool for students, with its focus on aggregating topical content. But So.cl won't get any traction outside the education sector. It's too unoriginal and wonky.

Beachy Head.

Beachy Head

Beachy Head is a chalk headland in the United Kingdom, close to the town of Eastbourne in the county of East Sussex, immediately east of the Seven Sisters. The cliff there is the highest chalk sea cliff in Britain, rising to 162 m (530 ft) above sea level. The peak allows views of the south east coast from Dungeness to the east, to Selsey Bill in the west. Its height has also made it one of the most notorious suicide spots in the world.