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Sumidagawa Fireworks Festival

The Sumidagawa Fireworks Festival is an annual fireworks festival held on the last Saturday in July, over the Sumidagawa near Asakusa. Unlike fireworks displays in other parts of the world, the Sumidagawa Hanabi Taikai is a competition held between rival pyrotechnic groups. Each group tries to out-do the last, and the result is an incredible variety of fireworks, not just in different colors and patterns, but forming shapes as complicated as Doraemon, Pikachu, or kanji.

Large Helical Device

The Large Helical Device is a fusion research device in Japan and is the largest superconducting stellarator in the world.

Crepuscular rays

Crepuscular rays are rays of sunlight that appear to radiate from the point in the sky where the sun is located. These rays, which stream through gaps in clouds or between other objects, are columns of sunlit air separated by darker cloud-shadowed regions. Despite seeming to converge at a point, the rays are in fact near-parallel shafts of sunlight. Their apparent convergence is a perspective effect, similar, for example, to the way that parallel railway lines seem to converge at a point in the distance.

André François

Andre Francois was a French cartoonist.

Ferdinand Cheval

Ferdinand Cheval was a French postman who spent 33 years of his life building Le Palais Idéal in Hauterives.

Boogie Down Productions

A hip hop group from New York. Their debut LP Criminal Minded contained frank descriptions of life in the South Bronx during the late 1980s.

Linnean herbarium

The Linnean herbarium at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm comprises some 4000 herbarium specimens, several of which are types formally designated by various experts. The specimens were once distributed by Linnaeus to his disciples and eventually they became part of the collections of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Argo

Argo is a global array of 3,000 free-drifting profiling floats that measures the temperature and salinity of the upper 2000 m of the ocean. This allows, for the first time, continuous monitoring of the temperature, salinity, and velocity of the upper ocean, with all data being relayed and made publicly available within hours after collection.

Eremitage Palace

Eremitage Palace is located in Dyrehaven north of Copenhagen, Denmark. The palace was built by architect Lauritz de Thurah in Baroque style from 1734 to 1736 for Christian VI of Denmark in order to host royal banquets during royal hunts in Dyrehaven.

Art-Rite

Cutting edge '70s New York art rag devoted to images from popular culture assembled by Alan Suicide; one half of the cult New York No-Wave duo "Suicide".

Opus

Encyclopædia of the sublime