In a tiny corner of western Poland a forest of about 400 pine trees grow with a 90 degree bend at the base of their trunks – all bent northward. Surrounded by a larger forest of straight growing pine trees this collection of curved trees, or “Crooked Forest,” is a mystery.

Planted around 1930, the trees managed to grow for seven to 10 years before getting held down, in what is understood to have been human mechanical intervention. Though why exactly the original tree farmers wanted so many crooked trees is unknown.

McQueen experimented with a range of dark and Gothic themes, so for Halloween the Alexander McQueen fashion house has released a video that plays with these themes in a unique and beautifully symmetrical way–using a variety of McQueen’s signature silk scarves.

 

“Big Money” by Norwegian design studio Skrekkøgle. They made a giant 20:1 replica of a 50 cent Euro coin. They then placed the coin next to large objects and photographed them together, making the objects look like tiny toy replicas. (via)

 

Tablets like the iPad will outnumber classroom computers within 5 years, a new survey says.

The survey asked 25 educational technology directors to describe their schools’ current and predicted use of tablets. All 25 were already using the iPad in the classroom. (No Android-based tablets are currently in use.) The deployment of iPads will be so thorough, it has been suggested, that it threatens to make obsolete the practice of lugging around textbooks…

In a recent interview with The Daily, James Peak, an educational consultant for Mindshapes, a London-based developer of educational apps, called the iPad the “single most significant innovation” in the classroom yet, and one that is “literally the best thing you can use” to help students learn more efficiently.

 

Cramming for midterms? Don’t bother, if you live in Miami. The Miami-Dade County school district, the fourth-largest in the country, has decided to make midterms and finals optional.

YouTube has finally made its crowd-sourced documentary Life in a Day available for viewing on its website.

The ambitious Ridley Scott-produced, Kevin Macdonald-directed project features 90 minutes of footage whittled down from 4,500 hours sent in by thousands of people who answered the filmmakers’ call to record their lives as it unfolded over the course of single day: July 24, 2010.

The resulting compilation made the rounds on the festival circuit before “finally coming home to YouTube.”

Subtitles are available in over 20 languages. A DVD of the film is also available for purchase via the Life in a Day YouTube channel.

Polaroid’s newest camera: the Z340!

It’s like an old school Polaroid mashed up with a ZINK digital printer — that means it prints inkless prints that are smudge & tear proof.

Unlike the original Polaroid, the print doesn’t pop out instantly. You select which photos you want printed.

Polaroid’s Z340 Camera – Old School Body, ZINK Insides