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Showing posts with label Weird. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Weird. Show all posts

The Festival of Exploding Sledgehammers


Every February, residents of the tiny town of San Juan de la Vega in Mexico perform the re-enactment of a four hundred year-old battle that took place between the local farmers and the wealthy landowners. According to legends, the farmers were sided by a local miner and rancher, and the town’s namesake, Juan aquino de la Vega, who was a Robin Hood type of person who robbed from the rich and gave it to the poor.
Unlike historic re-enactments where revelers dress in full costume and rage a mock war against each other, the feature of this re-enactment or festival is the detonation of handmade firecrackers by ramming them with sledgehammers. Explosive packets of fertilizers and sulfur are tied to the business end of sledgehammers and detonated by smashing them against rocks and metal plates. The firecrackers explode in a cloud of smoke and dust accompanied by flying shrapnel that tears through the flesh of onlookers.
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Agloe: A Fake Town That Became Real

Agloe: A Fake Town That Became Real


In the 1930s, a small town named Agloe suddenly began appearing on the maps of New York. It was positioned near an unmarked dirt road that led from Roscoe to Rockland, and near to Beaverkill. That road was neither visited by anyone nor was it popularly known, and very few people, if any, outside of the mapmakers’ company, knew that the town of Agloe didn’t even exist.

Agloe was a copyright trap—a century old trick mapmakers and dictionary makers have been using to catch copycats. When companies create a map, they perform all the hard work on it, including examining the right spellings, placing the cities in the right spot on the map, etc., and they need to protect their work. So they add small traps to the map—a fake street, a fantasy town. When another company steals their map, the original creators are able to take their competitors to court by pointing out the fake places that shouldn’t be on the map.
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The Basement Shops Bulgarian capital of Sofia


Street vendors are a common sight in cities across the world. The inability to pay high rent, or the unavailability of cheap commercial space, have pushed these small merchants on to streets, and in some cases, on to basements, as in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia.
Known as klek shops, these basement shops are unique to the city of Sofia. The shops are set in the basement of the buildings containing a small window that opens in the sidewalk, usually below the knee level. This is why they are known as “klek shops”—klek means knee. Products are displayed outside on the sidewalk, but to order something, customers need to squat and peer into the window and into the dimly lit face of the trader inside the basement.
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The 4-Ton Steel Ball That Produces Artificial Earthquakes


In the wooded hillside of Hainberg, near Göttingen, Germany, stands an old seismological station. The Wiechert Earthquake Station was built in 1902 by the noted German physicist and geophysicist, Emil Wiechert, to carry out research in the emerging field of geophysics. Wiechert built several seismographs there to record tremors. These instruments have been recording data uninterruptedly since then, becoming the world’s oldest, still functioning seismograph.
Emil Wiechert was interested in learning about the structure of the earth. A few years prior, he had published the first verifiable model of the Earth's interior as a series of shells. He argued that since the density of the Earth's surface rocks was different from the mean density of the Earth, the earth must be made of different layers of rocks of different densities. He concluded, correctly, that the earth has a heavy iron core.
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The Mintrop ball readying for a drop.
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Hilariously Oversized Objects That Will Make You Feel Small

Hilariously Oversized Objects That Will Make You Feel Small


Megalophobia or the fear of large objects is one of many phobias people suffer from. Still, humankind has always been fascinated by huge objects around us and these man-made oversized things will certainly prove that they’re not only mindblowing but can come in handy, as well.
Sometimes a regular version of things just isn’t enough and only enlarged alternatives can save the day.
We have stumbled upon 25 giant objects that are not only hilarious, but they may actually come in handy at one point or another.
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The Japanese Hotel Staffed By Robots


In the last few weeks, we have been hearing a lot about how robots have been replacing human workers across industries in developed countries. According to a recent study conducted jointly by economists from M.I.T. and Boston University, for every robot that was added to the workforce up to six workers have lost their job, and wages fell by as much as three-fourths of a percent. The study also found that up to 670,000 Americans have lost jobs to industrial robots between 1990 and 2007. Another study made an even more foreboding report —more than 10 million UK workers could be replaced by robots within the next 15 years.

While mechanization in industries is “necessary” to increase efficiency and reduce costs, robots in Japan are more of a novelty. Take Henn-na hotel near Nagasaki, for example. It has been billed as “the first robot-staffed hotel” in the world. From the receptionist to the bellhop to the concierge —all are robots.
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