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A hand-drawn clock!
Okay, this is deranged. There’s a chick in Russia whose hobby is riding her 1100-cc Kawasaki motorcycle through the irradiated heart of the Chernobyl region of Ukraine. Apparently the whole region is still deserted, which makes it a totally bodacious place to cruise: No stoplights, no pedestrians. Nothing, indeed, except for the occasional security guard who waves a dosimeter around your bike to make sure you haven’t, you know, contaminated yourself while racing 140 miles an hour through one of the most gruesome casualties of the Cold War.
The woman has taken a bunch of wonderfully creepy photographs of the ghost town nearby the Chernobyl plant, which was entirely evacuated in 30 days and has never been repopulated. Many of the houses are still filled with stuff lying around the house — as in the photo above — from vintage Soviet days. She’s also added in some pictures taken by her father, a former Soviet nuclear physicist.
My favorite part is her description of the eerie silence of the town:
Usually a police officer who call himself a town guard was telling me that I was in town alone. then I could hit roads with no worry that I will run accross some car. This town might be an attractive place for tourists. Some tourists companies have been trying to arrange extrim tours in this town, but people- their customers scared and have been complaining about silence which is hard to stand in empty town. They charged 210 us dollars for 2 hours excursion and town guard say, they all were leaving in some 15 mins, complaining that silense is tremendous as if one got deaf.
UPDATE: Oddly, barely 12 hours after I posted this entry, the site was temporarily taken down — the author promises it will be back online in May. I’m not sure what’s up. Is this thing a hoax? It didn’t seem so.
(Thanks to HiddenPCMaster for this one!)
I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.
Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!
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» visit the Collision Detection archives
September 26, 2008 » 01:57 PM
From an interview with ethnobotanist and anthropologist Wade Davis:
One of the cultures you celebrate in Light at the Edge of the World is the Inuit. What do you most admire about them?
Davis: The Inuit didn’t fear the cold; they took advantage of it. During the 1950s the Canadian government forced the Inuit into settlements. A family from Arctic Bay told me this fantastic story of their grandfather who refused to go. The family, fearful for his life, took away all of his tools and all of his implements, thinking that would force him into the settlement. But instead, he just slipped out of an igloo on a cold Arctic night, pulled down his caribou and sealskin trousers, and defecated into his hand. As the feces began to freeze, he shaped it into the form of an implement. And when the blade started to take shape, he put a spray of saliva along the leading edge to sharpen it. That’s when what they call the “shit knife” took form. He used it to butcher a dog. Skinned the dog with it. Improvised a sled with the dog’s rib cage, and then, using the skin, he harnessed up an adjacent living dog. He put the shit knife in his belt and disappeared into the night.
September 25, 2008 » 11:21 AM
“Video from a camp north of Toronto in December 2005 shows a car spinning around in a nearby, snow-covered parking lot. Prosecutors characterized that as special driver training but the defense, and many outsiders, said it was nothing more than “cutting doughnuts,” a favorite winter pastime of young Canadian motorists.” - A key piece of evidence submitted in the trial of a gang of alleged young Canadian terrorists.
September 24, 2008 » 11:21 PM
“Life imitates art imitating life: just thought a gnat crawling across my monitor was part of a Flash-based ad. I clicked it.” - A Tweet from Bill Braine.
September 24, 2008 » 02:37 PM
“Funniest FB friend request ever: “Twitter friend hoping to get to second base (Facebook!) ;-).”” - A recent Tweet by Pistachio
September 24, 2008 » 12:28 PM
Chinese powdered-milk crisis creates a new market: The return of the wet nurse
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