Room 3’s Blog

Click HERE to take you to the site to play the video

An old custom in China was the binding of the feet of females. We did have a small novel in the classroom about this, written in ’story style’.

Tonight I found a blog which has some pictures of what the feet of these women actually looked like. Rather than copying them here I am giving you the link, Bound Feet in China,so that if you are interested you can see for yourself. Remember it is an old custom!

I am pretty sure that this custom is now longer widely practised in China but there are probably some areas which have been unable to let go of  this tradition.

BTW There are other links to topics about China on this page.

In both newspapers I read today (NZ Herald and The Waikato Times) there was mention of a rainforest community which faces threat from civilisation. Both articles had photographs showing their primitive style living. Reading through some recent bookmarks in Diigo I found a link to this story online which you might want to read - Incredible pictures of one of Earth’s last uncontacted tribes firing bows and arrows

It is extraordinary to think that, in 2008, there remain about a hundred groups of people, scattered over the Earth, who know nothing of our world and we nothing of theirs, save a handful of brief encounters.

The uncontacted tribes, which are located in the jungles of South America, New Guinea and a remote and the beautiful and remote North Sentinel island in the Indian Ocean (the inhabitants of which have also responded to attempts at contact with extreme aggression) all have one thing in common - they want to be left alone.

And for good reason. The history of contact, between indigenous tribes and the outside world, has always been an unhappy one.

Ben Saunders is going to try and set a new world speed record from Ward Hunt Island to the Geographic North Pole.

Ben Saunders is a record-breaking long-distance skier, with three North Pole expeditions under his belt. He is the youngest to ski solo to the North Pole and holds the record for the longest solo Arctic journey by a Briton. Since 2001, Ben has skied more than 2,500km (1,500 miles) in the high Arctic, which he recently worked out equates to two percent of his entire life living in a tent.

The current record was set in 2005 by a guided team using dog sleds and numerous re-supplies in a time of 36 days 22 hours. Ben’s expedition will be solo and unsupported and on foot.

Read all about his adventure here. He is keeping a journal as he travels so you can read up to date reports on his blog plus you can leave comments / questions for him.

Watch this TED video about him as he prepares for this expedition.

Download Title

I came across this on Hey Jude’s blog.

Pretty amazing, isn’t it? Here’s a short blurb about it:

A Portrait of YouTube’s TheHill88 done with Vegemite and a butter knife on 9 pieces of toast. Original painting time 1hr 30mins.

This morning, at Lake Karapiro, our two top single sculls rowers will go head to head in the third and final trial race to see who will represent New Zealand at the Olympics. Will it be Rob Waddell or Mahe Drysdale?

I hope it’s Rob Waddell! We won’t actually know who is going to the Olympics until Friday.

Okay, how good are you at making predictions? If you watched Dancing With The Stars on TV tonight, how about making a prediction as to who you think will the final in 8 weeks time? You have to make your prediction between now and next Tuesday night - in 8 weeks time we’ll look back here and see how right, close or way out we were.

I’ll make my prediction after watching the rest of tonight’s show and I’ll leave it in the comments.

The link to this amazing video came from Julie Lindsay.

Worldwide one of a kind, the Vegetable Orchestra performs on instruments made of fresh vegetables. The utilization of various ever refined vegetable instruments creates a musically and aesthetically unique sound universe.

It reminds me of the man playing the variety of unusual musical instruments at the Arts Festival in Wellington while we were on camp last year. What do you think?

Powered by ScribeFire.

The first book of Philip Pulman’s best selling award winning trilogy “His Dark Materials’ is being made into a movie (The Golden Compass) and is due in cinemas December 2007. You might like to check it out at http://www.goldencompassmovie.com/

Check out this cool 3D map showing the weather all around the world.

http://freeearth.poly9.com/_weather/?C

You have the option of viewing the temperatures in Celsius or Fahrenheit.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about William Kamkwamba, a young boy from Africa (a self-taught engineer) who had become ‘famous’ for teaching himself how to build a windmill for his family. His TED video (3 minutes long) has just been released.

When he was just 14 years old, Malawian inventor William Kamkwamba built his family an electricity-generating windmill from spare parts, working from rough plans he found in a library book. In conversation with TED Curator Chris Anderson, Kamkwamba, now 19, tells a moving story of ingenuity and adaptation, and shares his dreams for the future. This talk inspired outpourings of support from the TED community and in the blogosphere.

This is well worth watching.