This photo isn't terrifying as long as you think it's just the bottom half of one postcard glued to the top half of another one. Or maybe it's an indoor swimming pool and the skyline is just a mural on the wall? Nope, that's a guy swimming to the edge of a pool on top of a skyscraper.
It's the Marina Bay Sands Skypark, and it's 55 stories (and 600 feet) above street level. If you're wondering where the edge of the pool is, and what keeps the guy from swimming right off the end and splattering to the pavement below, the answer to both is in the design. It's an "infinity pool" which has a lip under the water level, and over the side is a sort of gutter that catches both the water that runs off the side, and any drunken humans who drift over. [via]
These pictures aren't from some sci-fi movie, and they're not some wishful thinking mockup from one of those bullshit futuristic issues of Popular Science. This is an actual 20-story car storage facility for Volkswagens at a factory in Germany.
Are you thinking what we're thinking? That there should be a game show where you get to operate that thing like a giant claw machine and you win whatever car you can grab without dropping it?
We can find no record of how many car accidents were caused by this 200 foot-wide soccer player billboard in Munich, Germany. But can you imagine seeing this looming bastard rising up on the horizon as you crest the hill? Germany once again shows no regard for their sleepy and/or stoned motorists, who are going to slam on their brakes for fear their sedan will be kicked into a gigantic net a mile away.
Either these guys are living in that Robin Williams movie where he died and had to spend afterlife inside an oil painting, or else the bottom of their boat is about to melt from toxic waste sludge.
Actually that's algae which has overtaken Chaohu Lake in China. It's pretty, but it's also bad news for anyone relying on the lake for drinking water (as 300,000 people do). The Chinese government is spending billions trying to clean the stuff out of their rivers and lakes. According to the below photo, they do that by sending a dude out to scoop it off with a sauce pan.
This is one that looks less like Photoshop and more like bad MS Paint. But it's another one of those forced perspective works of art where strategically-placed lines give the illusion of a floating box (hint: it only works if you're standing in the right spot). In this case it's just bright green tape...
...and the skill of street artist Aakash Nihilani who randomly tapes misleading cubes in public spaces presumably for the sole purpose of freaking out passersby.
This rainbowfied F-22 Raptor fighter jet is not some crude Photoshopped commentary about gays in the military. It's an actual photo captured at exactly the right moment when the water vapor trailing off the aircraft caught the sun in just the right way to refract it. Credit Bernardo M. Malfitano for capturing the world's fruitiest picture of the world's most badass aircraft.
This bicycle that has gotten swallowed by a tree is a fairly famous landmark in Vashon Island (near Seattle). You can find numerous references to it, including multiple supposed back stories. One way or the other, the story boils down to somebody left their bike next to a little tree years ago and the tree just swallowed that bastard up when it got big. Trees do that:
Trees are living things just like you and me, and if survival means growing right around whatever happens to be parked between them and the sun, they're going to do it, without a moment's hesitation. Trees don't give a shit.
This carved watermelon is actually from a melon carving contest in the Czech Republic. The real difference between seedless and regular watermelon is whether or not mouths carved into them appear to have severe oral hygiene issues. Also, it's 10 times more disturbing because when we look at that thing we can't not picture Mick Jagger.
Get your camera close enough to some water droplets on a leaf and this is what you'll see. They call it macro photography (that is, extreme close-up photography) and it is in general cool as hell. This person has a whole collection of it on their Flickr page. When you zoom in on water droplets, you get that awesome refractive effect where it gives you a wide-angle view of whatever is behind it.
Actually this kind of looks like a tangram puzzle until you notice the tiny little ship chugging through there. Those neat fragments are chunks of floating ice in McMurdo Sound in Antarctica.
As for how you get those clean geometric shapes in the ice, well, that's just how ice breaks. When huge chunks of ice shelf break off due to global warming, it looks like it was cut with a damned laser:
That's neither a fake photo or a tiny set of hands. That's a freaking Atlas Moth. They're found in Southeast Asia and they can get up to a foot wide. And if one of them starts flapping around your porch light you'd better have a big goddamned shoe handy.
We included this one because it just looks so obviously like a bad Internet meme. You know, they take the lizard and they Photoshop various hats on it, maybe the next one has it in a little cowboy hat with a cigarette or something.
But no, this totally happened, in our world. It's a Komodo dragon at the St. Augustine alligator park, shown here happily celebrating his birthday in a Spongebob Squarepants hat. Making the situation almost too surreal to not be made up, that's a birthday cake made of meat and dead mice. Oh look kids, the cute lizard has a birthday hat on! And he's eating the star of Ratatouille! How cute!
If not Photoshop, you could assume this is just some rocks captured in mid-fall, like maybe just out of frame is a dump truck and the camera is seconds away from being buried. But, no, this is a stationary object and an example of the art form known as Rock Balancing.
That's pretty much self-explanatory, but proving that art forms are primarily created so that people can come up with pretentious ways of talking about them, there are actually four separate recognized categories of rock balancing. Just the thought of introducing oneself as a "freestyle rock balancer" should be enough to cause most people's balls to clench in anticipation of being soundly thumped.
This looks like one of the laziest cut and paste jobs of all time, but it is actually a photo from a flood in Grafton, Illinois. We have to admire that guy's efforts at keeping up his property value, especially since all the people who used to criticize his unkempt lawn are surely dead.
Yes, you can actually sleep in this underwater suite at Conrad Maldives Rangali Island, under the Indian Ocean. OK, it's not an Abyss situation where it's way down on the ocean floor, there is only about 20 feet of ocean above you. Still, you can see that you'll have plenty of fish watching you sleep and/or bone.
It looks a little like seeing somebody's feet through a kaleidoscope, but it's the feet of a Chinese boy who was born with 15 fingers and 16 toes. Don't worry, he's fine (he since had surgery to remove the extra appendages).
At first glance this looks almost exactly like a techno artist's design made with USB connectors. It's actually a satellite photo of an Australian wind farm still under construction. The ends of the apparent connectors are the bases where the wind turbines will soon be attached:
Here's a finished picture of the farm:
Does it make us nerds to have first noticed what an inefficient use of space that would be in Sim City?
