Mass Human Formations...

Almost a century ago and without the aid of any pixel-generating computer software, the itinerant photographer Arthur Mole (1889-1983) used his 11 x 14-inch view camera to stage a series of extraordinary mass photographic spectacles that choreographed living bodies into symbolic formations of religious and national community.

10 Most Extreem Places...

1 Lut Desert (Iran): hottest place on Earth at 159 °F (71 °C)

There is a big discussion about the hottest spot on Earth. Many believe it is in Al Azizyah, Libya, with a recorded temperature of 136 degrees Fahrenheit (57.8 Celsius), and the second hottest place being in Death Valley, California, USA, where it got up to 134 Fahrenheit in 1913. But according to other sites, a NASA satellite recorded surface temperatures as high as 71 °C (159 °F) in the Lut desert of Iran, supposedly the hottest temperature ever recorded on the surface of Earth. This region, which covers an area of about 480 kilometers, is called Gandom Beriyan (the toasted wheat).

2 Mt. Chimborazo (Ecuador): highest point above Earht's center at 20,703 feet (6,310 m) above sea level

Almost everyone knows that Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world. Climbers from everywhere travel to Everest hoping to earn the distinction of climbing the "World's Highest". The peak of Mount Everest is 8,848 meters (29,028 feet) above sea level. This high elevation gives Mount Everest the distinction of being the mountain with the highest altitude.But not many people know about Mt Chimborazo in Ecuador with an altitude of 6,310 meters (20,703 feet), which is less than Mount Everest; however, Chimborazo has the distinction of being the highest mountain above Earth's center. This is because Earth is not a sphere - it is an oblate spheroid. As an oblate spheroid, Earth is widest at its equator. Chimborazo is just one degree south of Earth's equator and at that location it is 6,384 kilometers from Earth's center or about 2 kilometers farther from Earth's center than Mount Everest. Ecuadorians find pride in this interesting fact. Nonetheless, Chimborazo cannot compare in difficulty, lack of oxygen, nor in fame, to Mount Everest.

3 Tristan de Cunha (UK): most remote inhabited archipelago on Earth at 2,000 miles from the nearest continent

The most remote inhabited island group in the world, Tristan de Cunha in the southern Atlantic Ocean, is so tiny its main island has no airstrip. Home to 272 people sharing just 8 surnames, inhabitants suffer from hereditary complaints like asthma and glaucoma. Annexed by the United Kingdom in the 1800s, the island's inhabitants have a British postal code and, while they can order things online, it takes a very long time for their orders to arrive. But then, that's the trade off for having your own island settlement some 2,000 miles from the nearest continent.

4 Angels Falls (Venezuela): Earth's highest waterfall with 3230 feet (984 m) in height

Angel Falls (Salto Ángel) in Venezuela is the highest waterfall in the world. The falls are 3230 feet in height with an uninterrupted drop of 2647 feet. Angel Falls are located on a tributary of the Rio Caroni. The falls are formed when the tributary stream falls from the top of Auyantepui (a tepui is a flat-topped structure surrounded by cliffs - similar to a mesa).

5 Oymyakon (Russia): coldest inhabited place on Earth at −96.2 °F (−71.2 °C)

Oymyakon is a village in Oymyakonsky Ulus of the Sakha Republic, Russia, located along the Indigirka River, 30 kilometers (20 mi) northwest of Tomtor on the Kolyma Highway. The population is 800 people. Oymyakon is known as one of the candidates for the Northern Pole of Cold, because on January 26, 1926, a temperature of −71.2 °C (−96.2 °F) was recorded there. This is the lowest recorded temperature for any permanently inhabited location on Earth. It is also the lowest temperature recorded in the Northern hemisphere.The lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth was -129 °F in 1983, at the Russian Base Vostok in Antarctica.

6 The Dry Valleys (Antarctica): driest place on Earth

One interior region of the Antarctic is known as The Dry Valleys. These valleys have not seen rainfall in over two million years. With the exception of one valley, whose lakes are briefly filled with water by inland flowing rivers during the summer, the Dry Valleys contain no moisture (water, ice, or snow). The reasons why the Dry Valleys exist are the 200 mph Katabatic down winds which evaporate all moisture. The dry valleys are strange: except for a few steep rocks they are the only continental part of Antarctica devoid of ice. Located in the Trans-Antarctic Range, they correspond to a mountain area where evaporation (or rather, sublimation) is more important than snowfall, thus all the ice disappears, leaving dry barren land.
Another driest place is the Atacama Desert in Chile, some parts of which have received absolutely zero precipitation in centuries. Parts of the Atacama Desert may actually exceed the dryness of most of Antarctica, though data from the latter is insufficient to tell.

7 Marianas Trench (Indonesia and Japan): lowest point on Earth at 35,840 feet (10,924 m) below sea level

Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench (or Marianas Trench) is the deepest point in Earth's oceans. The bottom there is 10,924 meters (35,840 feet) below sea level. If Mount Everest, the highest mountain on Earth, were placed at this location it would be covered by over one mile of water. The only people to have ever explored this trench were Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh. At the bottom they were seven miles down and all around them eight tons of pressure. They observed fish, shrimp and other creatures living on the bottom of the sea floor.

8 Cherrapunji (India): wettest place on Earth

Cherrapunji, North-Eastern India is thought for many years to be the wettest place in the world. Here 10,820mm rain falls on average in a year. Unlike Colombia where the rain falls throughout the whole year, Cherrapunji gets most of its rain during the 'south-west monsoon', or wet season, between June and August. Cherrapunji does hold the record for the wettest month on record, recording 9,296mm in July 1861. Actually, between 1860 and 1862 Cherrapunji was incredibly wet; between August 1st 1860 and July 31st 1861 (which overlaps parts of 2 wet seasons) 26,467mm rain fell. In the calendar year 1861 22,987mm rain fell, of which 22,454 fell between April and September.

9 Mount Thor (Canada): Earth's greatest vertical drop

Mount Thor, in Auyuittuq National Park on Baffin Island, Nunavut, Canada, presents a 4,100 foot pure vertical drop. Mt. Thor is Canada's most famous peak, and it's made of pure granite. It's a favorite of thrill seekers and climbers. Mount Thor was first climbed in 1953 by an Arctic Institute of North America team. There have been a few recent rappel expeditions, with one fatality in 2006.

10 Dead Sea (Jordan): Earth's lowest elevation at 1,385 ft (422 mt) below sea level

The Dead Sea is the lowest elevation on Earth's surface on dry land, its surface and shores are 422 meters (1,385 ft) below sea level. On the border of Jordan and Israel, the road around the Dead Sea also happens to be the lowest road on Earth. Famous for its salinity (over ten times that of the Mediterranean Sea), the Dead Sea is said to be home of the first health retreat. Because of the extreme salt content, no life can survive in the sea, hence the name.

On The Edge of Victoria falls

Victoria Falls is on the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe. It is 360 feet tall. At the top is a natural rock pool, called Devil's Pool, where the water is relatively calm. From September to December, when the water level is low, you can swim in Devil's Pool. The pictures are bound to make you just a little nervous. Or a lot.


















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Milky Way Galaxy

The Milky Way, or simply the Galaxy, is the galaxy in which the Solar System is located. It is a barred spiral galaxy that is part of the Local Group of galaxies. It is one of billions of galaxies in the observable universe.Its name is a translation of the Latin Via Lactea, in turn translated from the Greek(Galaxias),referring to the pale band of light formed by the galactic plane as seen from Earth (see etymology of galaxy). Some sources hold that, strictly speaking, the term Milky Way should refer exclusively to the band of light that the galaxy forms in the night sky, while the galaxy should receive the full name Milky Way Galaxy, or alternatively the Galaxy. However, it is unclear how widespread this convention is, and the term Milky Way is routinely used in either context.

Observation data

Type :SBbc (barred spiral galaxy)
Diameter :100,000 light years
Thickness :1,000 light years
Number of stars :100-400 billion (1–4×1011)
Oldest known star :13.2 billion years
Mass :5.8 × 1011 M☉
Sun's distance to galactic center :26,000 ± 1,400 light-years
Sun's galactic rotation period :220 million years (negative rotation)
Spiral pattern rotation period :50 million years
Bar pattern rotation period :15 to 18 million years
Speed relative to CMB rest frame :552 km/s

Size

The stellar disk of the Milky Way galaxy is approximately 100,000 light-years (9.5×1017 km) in diameter, and is believed to be, on average, about 1,000 ly(9.5×1015 km) thick. It is estimated to contain at least 200 billion stars and possibly up to 400 billion stars, the exact figure depending on the number of very low-mass stars, which is highly uncertain. Extending beyond the stellar disk is a much thicker disk of gas. Recent observations indicate that the gaseous disk of the Milky Way has a thickness of around 12,000 ly (1.1×1017 km)—twice the previously accepted value. As a guide to the relative physical scale of the Milky Way, if it were reduced to 10m in diameter, the Solar System, including the Oort cloud, would be no more than 0.1mm in width (0.001%).The Galactic Halo extends outward, but is limited in size by the orbits of two Milky Way satellites, the Large and the Small Magellanic Clouds, whose perigalacticon is at ~180,000 ly (1.7×1018 km). At this distance or beyond, the orbits of most halo objects would be disrupted by the Magellanic Clouds,and the objects would likely be ejected from the vicinity of the Milky Way.
Recent measurements by the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) have revealed that the Milky Way is much heavier than some previously thought. The mass of our home galaxy is now considered to be roughly similar to that of our largest local neighbour, the Andromeda Galaxy. By using the VLBA to measure the apparent shift of far-flung star-forming regions when the Earth is on opposite sides of the Sun, the researchers were able to measure the distance to those regions using fewer assumptions than prior efforts. The newer and more accurate estimate of the galaxy's rotational speed (and in turn the amount of dark matter contained by the galaxy) puts the figure at about 254 km/s, significantly higher than the widely accepted value of 220 km/s. This in turn implies that the Milky Way has a total mass equivalent to around 3 trillion Suns, about 50% more massive than some previously thought.

Age

It is extremely difficult to define the age of the Milky Way but the age of the oldest star in the Galaxy yet discovered, HE 1523-0901, is estimated to be about 13.2 billion years, nearly as old as the Universe itself.
This estimate is based on research by a team of astronomers in 2004 using the UV-Visual Echelle Spectrograph of the Very Large Telescope to measure,for the first time, the beryllium content of two stars in globular cluster NGC 6397.[citationneeded] From this research, the elapsed time between the rise of the first generation of stars in the entire Galaxy and the first generation of stars in the cluster was deduced to be 200 million to 300 million years. By including the estimated age of the stars in the globular cluster (13.4 ± 0.8 billion years), they estimated the age of the oldest stars in the Milky Way at 13.6 ± 0.8 billion years. Based upon this emerging science, the Galactic thin disk is estimated to have been formed between 6.5 and 10.1 billion years ago.

Composition and structure

The Galaxy consists of a bar-shaped core region surrounded by a disk of gas, dust and stars forming four distinct arm structures spiralling outward in a logarithmic spiral shape (see Spiral arms). The mass distribution within the Galaxy closely resembles the Sbc Hubble classification, which is a spiral galaxy with relatively loosely-wound arms. Astronomers first began to suspect that the Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy in the 1990s rather than an ordinary spiral galaxy. Their suspicions were confirmed by the Spitzer Space Telescope observations in 2005 which showed the Galaxy's central bar to be larger than previously suspected. The Milky Way's mass is thought to be about 5.8 × 1011 solar masses (M☉) comprising 200 to 400 billion stars. Its integrated absolute visual magnitude has been estimated to be −20.9. Most of the mass of the Galaxy is thought to be dark matter, forming a dark matter halo of an estimated 600–3000 billion M☉ which is spread out relatively uniformly.

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ECHEVERIA

Echeveria is a large genus of succulents in the Crassulaceae family, native from Mexico to northwestern South America. The genus is named after the 18th century Mexican botanical artist, Atanasio Echeverría y Godoy. Many of the species produce numerous offsets, and are commonly known as 'Hen and chicks', which can also refer to other genera such as Sempervivum that are significantly different from Echeveria.

Many Echeveria species are popular as garden plants. They are drought-resistant, although they do better with regular deep watering and fertilizing. Most will tolerate shade and some frost, although hybrid species tend to be less tolerant. They can be propagated easily by separating offsets, but may also be propagated by leaf cuttings, and by seed if they are not hybrids. Echeverias are polycarpic, meaning that they may flower and set seed many times over the course of their lifetimes.

Most lose their lower leaves in winter; as a result, after a few years, the plants lose their attractive, compact appearance and need to be rerooted or propagated. In addition, if not removed, these shed leaves may decay, harboring fungus which can then infect the plant.


Kingdom: Plantae
Division: Magnoliophyta
(unranked): eudicots
Order: Saxifragales
Family: Crassulaceae
Genus: Echeveria




Information collect by:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echeveria

SENBAZURU

How to Assemble a Senbazuru

from wikiHow - The How to Manual That You Can Edit

The senbazuru comes from an ancient Japanese legend that says a wish will be granted to anyone who folds 1000 paper cranes. Today, senbazuru are given as good luck wishes at weddings and births or hung in the home. Often, they will be given to loved ones in the hospital, to wish them a speedy recovery.
Senbazuru have become strong symbols of world peace with the story of Sadako Sasaki, a young girl who died of leukemia following the bombing of Hiroshima. She was buried with the thousand paper cranes she folded while in the hospital. Today, senbazuru are left on temples with eternal flames for World Peace, along with a prayer for peace.
While folding one thousand paper cranes is a large undertaking, putting them together into a senbazuru is pretty easy! When you are done, you can hang it for good luck, or wish goodluck on someone else by giving it away.

Steps

1. Cut a long length of thread--better to have too much than too little.
   
2. Thread your sewing or dollmaking needle.
   
3. Tie a bead (see "Things You'll Need" for other suggestions) at the bottom of the thread to ensure the cranes don't fall off.
   
4. Push the needle up through the hole at the bottom of each crane.
   
5. Repeat Step 4 until you have completed the strand.
   
6. Tie a loop in the top of the strand and hang the strand from a hook, nail, chair, doorknob, or anyplace you can admire your progress and keep your cranes neat.
   
7. After you have completed all of the strands, tie them together at the top to a ring so the entire senbazuru can hang freely.
   
8. Congratulate yourself! You've made something beautiful and meaningful.
   

Tips

• Decide how long you want your strands to be before starting. Traditionally, the thousand cranes are divided so that the strands are even. You may want 50 strands of 20 cranes each, or 40 strands of 25 cranes, or even 20 strands of 50 cranes...you're the artist, you decide.
  
• Some people add one extra crane for extra good luck.
  
• Decide if you want a color scheme: rainbow effect, light to dark, smooth paper or textured paper. There are virtually endless possibilities.
  
• Instead of a craft ring, you can take a long piece of floral wire and twist it into a circle, rectangle, triangle, or whatever other shape you want to hang your strands from.
  
• Some schools pool their resources when a student or teacher is in the hospital, with each member of the school folding one or two cranes and then taking the finished senbazuru to the hospital.
  

Things You'll Need

• 1,000 paper cranes
  
• Sewing needle or dollmaking needle (if the cranes are large)
  
• Thread, dental floss, fishing line, or any similar product.
  
• Small beads, charms, small rolls of paper, or small sticks to finish the strands.
  
• A small ring or similar object to enable hanging the completed project.
  
• Optional: A few friends
  

Related wikiHows

• How to Make an Origami Paper Crane
  
• How to Make an Origami Flying Bird