"Uh Oh. Construction workers please note: Somebody just built a 20-foot tower using flying robots. No people involved." Eric Guizo notes: "The ceiling of the room where the assembly is taking place was equipped with a motion-capture system. A computer uses the vision data to keep track of the quadcopters and tell them where to go — the same approach used at ETH's Flying Machine Arena"
posted by MHPlost on Jan 3, 2012 - 41 comments

I had never heard of Dustin Shuler before today. So, this is not an obit post, even if I learned about his death at the same time I discovered his art in this nytimes article. So I visited his website. Although his work has been dismissed as "derivative", there is only one word to describe an artist who has created "Destruction of the Nightmare Towers" in 1977 and "Death of an era" in 1980: visionary.
posted by bru on May 14, 2010 - 23 comments

In 2000, the British Film Institute voted Fawlty Towers number 1 on its list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes. Perhaps an even greater tribute, numerous real-life lodgings have named themselves after it. Next month, Connie Booth - now a practicing psychotherapist in London - will break a 30 year silence about the show for a televised special. [more inside]
posted by Joe Beese on Apr 11, 2009 - 79 comments

The fire tower, or fire lookout, was one of the main wildfire-fighting tools of forest services across the world for much of the 20th century. Most are small cabins, alone or placed on 80-foot steel towers; these are then placed on top of peaks, giving them an unobstructed view of the surrounding countryside. (There are some exceptions, of course.) Operators in the towers, equipped with binoculars and firefinders, spent their days searching for smoke or lightning strikes, which would be pinpointed and radioed in for firefighters. (The lookout operators, who staff the towers for a season at a time straight, have a life that is generally pretty solitary and quiet, though sometimes rather intense.) At peak, there were thousands of fire towers across North America; while most of these no longer exist, a few hundred are still active. [more inside]
posted by Upton O'Good on Mar 2, 2009 - 35 comments

"The business is definitely an art, the men are craftsmen..."(YT) NYC's rooftop water tanks are a unique and often overlooked part of the city. Watch as one goes up (its worth the 10 minutes for the money shot at the end): "New York, is water tanks, yes."(YT) "New York, which has thousands of cylindrical wooden rooftop water tanks with conical roofs, couldn't exist without them." Its the only city with its own section under Wiki's water tower page.
posted by allkindsoftime on Jun 22, 2007 - 44 comments

Camouflage Cell Towers hidden in trees, buildings, and crosses.
posted by adzm on Apr 7, 2005 - 7 comments

Fighting to Live as the Towers Died : the NYT continues its fine reporting, reconstructing the final moments of temporary survivors on the upper floors, through over 150 e-mail and telephone contacts used to reach friends and relatives (as well as videotapes and recordings of 911 calls and emergency radio bands). Since I briefly worked in the trade center, I have often wondered what this experience must have been like. You may want to take a moment to prepare, and expect to need breaks.
posted by dhartung on May 26, 2002 - 48 comments

Filling the Void Phantom Towers, a memorial by Paul Myoda and Julian LaVerdiere. "They imagined two powerful beams rising from a reflecting pool, refilling the void left by the twin towers with incandescence."
posted by Nick Finck on Sep 17, 2001 - 25 comments

Design choice for tower helped save lives : via FARK - can you imagine what would have happened had the planes hit the base of the towers?
posted by Mossy on Sep 12, 2001 - 5 comments