Tag: history

The pace of modern world

the pace of modern lifexkcd has a brilliant collection of quotes from the days long gone.  All of those complain about how the world has become too fast and how we don’t care about the important things anymore.  The best part about these collection however is that all of these quotes are from the end of 19th and beginning of 20th century.  Once you drop ignore a few minor technical references like telegraph, it’s almost exactly like the complaints we hear today.  The world is too fast and we don’t care anymore…

Friendship of nations through notable statues

This heavily edited image found its way into my Facebook stream (sorry, don’t know who’s the author of the image):

friendship of nations

 

These are, of course, three iconic statues photoshopped together (left to right): The Motherland Calls, Christ the Redeemer, and the Statue of Liberty.  Each one has interesting stories and unique value to the nation of its people.

My interest was more in the relative sizes of one to another.  On the edited images, all three appear somewhat the same.  But is it true in real life?  Wikipedia (links above) shows that they are not.

  • The Motherland Calls was the tallest statue at the time of construction, in 1967.  It measures 87 meters from the tip of the sword to the base of the platform on which it stands.
  • The Statue of Liberty was constructed in 1886 and measures 46 meters.  It does appear much higher, because of the pedestal on which it stands.  With the one it goes as high as 93 meters.
  • Christ the Redeemer was built in 1931 and is only 30 meters tall.  Together with the pedestal it’s 38 meters high.

There is another metric that escaped the generalization – The Motherland Calls’ sword is 33 meters long.  Look at the numbers above.  It’s actually longer than the whole statue of Christ the Redeemer (without the pedestal).  Wow!  That’s a lot of scaling for the image of friendship.

While reading up on these statues, I found another image, which actually puts them together on a scale.

Height comparison of notable statues

 

Oops!  So much for the friendship of nations.  There’s a the Spring Temple Buddha, built in 2002, rising up 128 meters.  I guess nobody wants to be friends with him.  Or any of those smaller statues to the right of Jesus the Redeemer.