Harbin Ice Festival

Found this site with some amazing pictures of the ice and snow sculptures in the Harbin Ice festival. Teams come from all over the wold to compete in both snow and ice sculptures. Whole buildings are built using ice cut from the local river, Songhua Jiang.

Check out the site: Harbin Snow and Ice Festival
Wikipedia article on the festival: Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival

Weird conversions and cockroaches

Have you ever wondered how many cockroaches would equal the great wall of china? How about the golden gate bridge? Really? You have? Well that's good news. Because now you can find out using the weird converter. You can compare all sorts of things on the site. You can even suggest new things to add to the site for future conversions. Pretty funny.

Weird Converter

Mining electronic waste

Found an interesting photo essay about the electronics recycling industry in the city of Guiyu China. It has a lot of interesting pictures, and some pretty interesting stats. one ton of computer scrap contains more gold than 17 tons of gold ore. Extracting that gold though, is a lot harder. So for the moment it is cheaper for most western nations to simply dump the waste. In China, where labor is cheap, it is economically feasible to do the extraction. The pictures are pretty good, so I would recommend checking them out.

Check out the Photo essay at Foreign Policy: Inside the Digital Dump

Scariest swing in the world

The picture above is of the worlds highest swing. It is 1100 feet off the ground on top of a skyscraper in Harbin city, Heilongjiang province, China. The swing sends you out over the city before swinging you back onto the top of the building. personally I hate heights. Getting up on the roof of my house, or standing on a ladder are torture. Last year I had to stand on a ladder two stories up to nail plywood over the windows of my house as hurricane protection. I hated it!
That said, I love roller coasters and sky swings. Mainly because they scare me. The adrenaline rush from the fear is great when I'm having fun. Trying to hold onto a ladder or maintain my footing on a sloped roof with that adrenalin rush is not so good. So I think if I ever got to try the swing out, I would. Imagine how scary it would be.

Via Spluch and Ananova

Chinese Counterfeit DisneyLand

The Shijingshan Amusement Park in China appears to be a complete ripoff of Disney's Disneyland. The owners of the park claim that all the characters are original and were not copied from Disney. But it is really obvious that there has been some blatant copying involved. A spokesman for the park claims that the above picture is not a mouse, and certainly not a copy of Disney's Mini Mouse. In fact, they claim it is a cat with really big ears. LOL The parks slogan, “Disneyland is too far,” is even a dig for DisneyLand.

Follow the link for a lot more pictures of the fake DisneyLand.
Via JapanProbe: Disneyland in China?