Link About It: This Week’s Picks
Sheep invade Madrid, Japan’s whiskey win, One World Trade Center opens and more in our weekly look at the web
1. The New World Trade Center
After 13 years of planning and development, One World Trade Center has finally opened its doors and welcomed its new tenants. To celebrate, Time Magazine pays tribute to the dedicated people who built the new tower and the numerous challenges they faced. The achievement is best captured in a fully navigable panoramic photograph of NYC taken from the top of One World Trade Center, which shares the construction crew’s dizzying perspective as they worked from to the top of this 1,776-foot “glass-and-steel exclamation point.”
2. Japan Takes World’s Best Whiskey Title
With the release of the “Whiskey Bible 2015,” the world will see
the 2013 Yamazaki Single Malt Sherry Cask awarded “World Whiskey of the Year” by
connoisseur Jim Murray. With a score of 97.5 out of 100, the Japanese
whiskey surprised an industry historically dominated by Scotland, which
did not produce a top-five whiskey for the first time since the publication’s founding a decade ago.
3. An Acoustic “Synthesizer”
Imagine the avant-garde soundtrack to a sci-fi movie—created without any electronic music instruments. Istanbul-based artist Görkem Şen has created the Yabahar, which looks more like a scientific measuring instrument than anything musical. But when Sen hits, plucks and even bows the Yabahar, otherworldly sounds emerge. With no additional effects or post audio processing, even the reverb is achieved naturally through the long coils.
4. Will Letter for Lunch
Lauren Hom has found a creative way to a free lunch. The young SVA graduate is trading her talent as a hand-letterer for food. By flexing her artistic and entrepreneurial skills, she’s been able to eat and drink at some of NYC’s top restaurants and, in return, these eateries get some super-classy signage that is sure to catch the eye.
5. Sheep Invade Madrid
Last Sunday, over 2,000 sheep were herded through the bustling Spanish capital in an effort to raise awareness about grazing and animal migration rights. Traditional sheep rearing—a dearly held Spanish tradition—is threatened by industrial agriculture and urban sprawl, a result of swelling population growth. Certain shepherding routes date back 800 years, and shepherds and activists alike halted traffic as they passed through the city’s busiest areas.
6. A Ship Too Big to be Photographed
At more than 530 yards long and 80 yards wide, the Prelude is
officially the largest ship in the world. Built to
refine oil, the ship is so big in fact, that it’s not possible to be
photographed in its entirety—it took photographer Stephen Mallon two
days and a thousand pictures to create a single, stitched-together
image. The New York Times explains the monstrous vessel—currently under construction in a South Korean shipyard—has a turret the size of the Statue of Liberty and is expected to displace 600,000 metric tons of water.
7. The Internet Arcade
The non-profit Internet Archive is well-known for its Wayback Machine, which lets users see older, archived versions of web pages—allowing us to gawk at what Amazon looked like in 1995 or “Thefacebook” in 2004. The Internet Archive’s most recent addition, however, is a bit out of their usual domain (excuse the pun). They’ve just added 900 video games spanning the ’70s to the ’90s that can be played on your web browser—no quarters needed. From Pac Man to Astro Invader, historical archives have never been so entertaining.
8. 3D Soundscape for the Visually Impaired
This week Microsoft and London-based urban innovation research firm Future Cities Catapult released the first installment of their Cities Unlocked program, which aims to make urban areas more accessible for the visually impaired. The specially designed headset creates a 3D soundscape for the wearer, giving environmental and organizational information via jaw bone contact vibration. If a user is headed to a particular store and the destination is behind them, the sound feedback will come from what seems to be behind them. The program promises to make urban lives of the visually impaired more independent and fulfilling.
Link About It is our filtered look at the web, shared daily on Twitter and published weekly every Saturday morning.
