The Uniform Project is a campaign to raise money for the Akanksha Foundation (a grassroots movement that is revolutionizing education in India) in which Sheena Matheiken will wear one dress for one year as an exercise in sustainable fashion.
Though she’s wearing one dress, there are seven identical copies of it so that she can have a clean one each day of the week, and each day, Sheena will reinvent the dress with layers, accessories and all kinds of accouterments, the majority of which will be vintage, hand-made, or hand-me-down goodies.
The Places We Live is a fascinating look at some of the poorest slums on earth.
It’s the work of Jonas Bendiksen, who traveled to Caracas, Venezuela; Kibera, Nairobi, Kenya; Dharavi, Mumbai, India; and Jakarta, Indonesia from 2005 to 2007, documenting life in these slums, and capturing images of the diversity of personal histories and outlooks found in these dense neighborhoods that, despite commonly held assumptions, are not simply places of poverty and misery.
Yet slum residents continuously face enormous challenges such as the lack of health care, sanitation, and electricity.
The site does really well at simulating the experience of living in the slums, and you can listen to a narration of numerous different stories told by the people who lived them as you examine their home and listen to the sounds of the slums all around you.
In addition to the website, Jonas has also published a book that includes 20 double-gatefold images, each representing an individual home and its denizens’ stories.
Urban Monarch and Modern Drunkard put together two great guides about how to score free drinks when you go out. Put down the credit card, and slowly step away.
Artist Felix Beck created a non-visual graffiti project called Soundbombs, “innocuous-looking 6-inch plastic shells that broadcast short clips (lines from Shakespeare, flatulence, or anything else you record) to unwitting passersby”. He doesn’t sell them, but instead takes applications, and prospective users must tell him where they will use it and how much they’re willing to pay. Get loud.
Sodium Laurel Sulfate, and ingredient in toothpaste, blocks sweet sensors on your tongue, which explains why orange juice tastes so bad after you brush.
Stuart Haygarth created the Tide Chandelier out of man made debris that washed up along a stretch of the Kent coastline. “The sphere is an analogy for the moon which effects the tides which in turn wash up the debris”.
A new pepper has been crowned king of hot thanks to the Guinness Book of World Records. The Bhut Jolokia chili (AKA The Naga Jolokia Pepper) from India registered 1,001,304 Scoville heat units, far surpassing the previous champions, the Red Savina chili, which only registered 577,000 units, and the Dorset Naga, which registered between 876,000 and 970,000 units. Just to give you an idea, here are the Scoville heat units of some of the peppers you probably ingest on a more regular basis:
0 – Bell Pepper
100-500 – Pepperoncini
1000-1500 – Poblano
2500-10,000 – Jalapenos and Chipolte
5000-23,000 – Serrano
30,000-50,000 – Cayenne
80,000 & up – Habenero, Scotch Bonnet
