A week of calamity in landscapes reads! Did microbes cause the largest mass extinction in earth’s history? Why is California sinking? What did we learn from the biggest earthquake in America fifty years ago? And, closer to home, how dangerous should a playground be?
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I’ve seen some cool playground slides in my day, but this one has got to be the neatest. It is attached to a jetliner. How much fun would that be to use? In fact this would be a cool way to exit a plane at any time. I dont know about you, but I would spend all day playing on this thing.
This twisty slide is mounted to a Tupolev Tu-124 located in the Ukraine, where all of the kids grow up awesome and not fearing heights at all. Cool as this thing is though, I don’t know if I would trust those supports to hold the airplane up. They don’t look all that sturdy. Then again, it makes it more of a fun danger game. Slide, then run.
Every time you make it out safely you win… Until you don’t.
[via Neatorama]
One of the most popular smartphone applications on any platform has been the Angry Birds franchise. Now, it’s maker, Rovio has teamed up for something that will have kids in Finland screaming with joy. Rovio and Finnish hotel and resort company Holiday Club will be building Angry Birds Activity Parks in three of its spa hotels.
The parks will be year-round indoor playgrounds with the first scheduled to be completed by Christmas 2012 in Kuusamon Tropiikki. In February 2013, another Angry Birds Park will launch in Saariselkä with another one coming in the fall to Saimaa. The image above is a rendering of what the activity park will look like.
I wonder why we’re not seeing Angry Birds playgrounds or theme parks launch in the United States yet. I know my kids would go bonkers to play at one of these.
If you ever went riding on a seesaw when you were a kid, you know how unrewarding the experience could be if the kid on the other side weighed decidedly more or less than you. But thanks to the laws of physics, one designer has come up with a solution to this problem.
Industrial designer Honghai Yu’s Balance seesaw offers an adjustable seating design which fixes the balance problem by allowing the lighter of the two children to pull their seat out, and moving one child further away from the pivot point. The result – a smooth ride on the teeter-totter for all. It’s not clear, though how significantly the riders’ weights could differ for this to work before the length of the seat extension became impractical. I’m sure some of the physics geeks out there could help calculate that for us.
It’s an ingeniously simple solution to an age-old playground problem. There’s no word on if or when the Balance seesaw will show up in parks, but it did take home a 2012 iF concept design award.
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