Haha, those really look pretty weird. Would you guys wear that? Like every day? XD
This is way too far away from me, but if you happen to be in Ho Chi Minh City during the summer ...
This is a great video depicting the issues people have to deal with when they don't have the luxury ...
100,000 LED lights down the Sumida River, Japan
Photo: tokyo-hotaru.com
The inaugural Tokyo Hotaru festival was held last weekend. And kicking off the festivities were an impressive display of 100,000 LED lights – made to resemble hotaru (fireflies) – that floated down the Sumida River through central Tokyo. Dubbed “prayer stars,” the LEDs were provided by Panasonic, who claims that the balls, which were designed to light up upon contact with water, were 100% powered by solar energy. After illuminating a large stretch of the river, which also hosts a popular fireworks festival in the summer, the LEDs were all caught in a large net....
Money and Happiness: China Surveys Suggest a Limited Link
After two decades of extraordinarily rapid economic growth, people in China aren’t much happier than when they started, suggests a new review of happiness and national income in the world’s largest, most economically accelerated country.
On the whole, China’s wealthy are slightly happier than before, but little appears to have changed among middle-income earners. Among lower income brackets, life satisfaction seems to have dropped precipitously.
These trends are not an argument against capitalism or economic growth — but they do hint at shortcomings in using standard economic metrics as shorthand for well-being.
“There is no evidence of an increase in life satisfaction of the magnitude that might have been expected to result from the fourfold improvement in the level of per capita consumption,” write researchers led by economist Richard Easterlin in their May 15 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper....
Apocalypse Prep: How to Preserve Food Without a Fridge
Photo: Jihyun Ryou
When you bring food home from a grocery store, chances are you toss it in the fridge. Ever stop to wonder if that's your best move? People managed to store perishables before the era of refrigeration, and if you're imagining a root cellar full of cans and preserves, you're only partially right.
Designer Jihyun Ryou has made it her mission to, er, preserve some of those old methods of preserving food, designing this minimalist system for the modern kitchen."We hand over the responsibility of taking care of food to the technology, the refrigerator," says Rhyou. "We don’t observe the food any more and we don’t understand how to treat it."
Are you really treating your food badly when you pop it in the fridge? Well, you're sealing it in a cold box with a bunch of other food -- all of it off-gassing and slowly decomposing. Each item reacts to the chemical composition of the other items, and to the environment itself....
