Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Kew Gardens' new exhibition "Gardens of Glass" opened yesterday. Scattered throughout the gardens are a selection of new and older works by Dale Chihuly.

I'm a big fan of Chihuly's work, and an opportunity to see more than 25 installations of his glass works less than 15 minutes from our door was too good to miss.

The weather was fine, and the bright sunlight added reflections and colour to Chihuly's massive (yet oh so fragile) art. Passing clouds and the slow moving arc of the sun's path made each moment with each sculpture new. Sometimes finding the art was an expedition in its own right, the installations hidden amongst the green of Kew's immense greenhouses.

There's a Flickr photoset here.



Of course, we only visited two of the three main sites (the Palm House and its lake, and the Princess Of Wales Conservatory) - so next time, it's off to the largest collection of glass in the Temperate House...

The Gardens of Glass exhibition runs untl the 15th of January 2006.

A rather fascinating photo essay covering the fallen hulks of rockets launched from Baikonur.

All space-bound rockets consist largely of fuel tanks and booster stages that fall back to earth when spent, never reaching orbit. In landlocked Baikonur, Russia's primary launching complex in Kazakhstan, these spaceships crash to earth. This photo essay visits the areas where the supporting rockets land, and shows the people living under the flight paths who contend with flaming spaceship wrecks several times each month.

Rag and bone men scavenging the ruins of the space age - it's another of those "we're living in an SF novel" moments. Only now it's more The Centurai Device than Neuromancer...



[via Amygdala]

The Little Giantess and The Sultan of the Indes (with his time-travelling elephant) will be in London on the 8^th to the 11^th September...



It's a massive four-day long puppet show created as part of Nantes' commemorations for the centenary of the death of Jules Verne.

[via jwz]