Media designer Shahee Ilyas has created pie charts showing the colors of the flags of over 200 nations.
Embedded on top is a screencap of a portion of the display, alphabetically arranged (Afghanistan, Albania...); the original at the artist's website will display the name of the country when a mouse is passed over the pie chart. The larger pie chart on the bottom is a composite of all the colors from all of the flags.
Via The Life and Times of Michael5000, who notes that the color violet/lavender/purple is notably absent from world flags (as is gray).
Using a list of countries generated by The World Factbook database, flags of countries fetched from Wikipedia are analysed by a custom made python script to calculate the proportions of colours on each of them. That is then translated on to a piechart using another python script. The proportions of colours on all unique flags are used to finally generate a piechart of proportions of colours for all the flags combined.
Embedded on top is a screencap of a portion of the display, alphabetically arranged (Afghanistan, Albania...); the original at the artist's website will display the name of the country when a mouse is passed over the pie chart. The larger pie chart on the bottom is a composite of all the colors from all of the flags.
Via The Life and Times of Michael5000, who notes that the color violet/lavender/purple is notably absent from world flags (as is gray).
Comments (12)
Also, duplicates are not always bad. Especially since the original is over 2 years old. I would not have seen this had it not been posted again. Thanks!
Still neat though.
1. make a big sheet of gingerbread-- roll it out right on wax paper or parchment the size of the cookie sheet. then when it comes out of the oven, quickly cut out the pieces using the paper pattern pieces you have ready. (the g'bread is soft at this point-- gets hard as it cools)
2. stick the pieces together with toothpicks.
3. Use royal icing. it is basically uncooked meringue; has eggwhites. It is super sticky and dries hard as a rock, almost. It is more an engineering material than a food. It also holds the decorations on tight.
4. new geeky idea-- make lego guy gingerbread men to go with. Heck, make a gingerbread laptop with only m's and s's for keys. (m&m's and sprints or whatever they are called)
I ended up doing Angkor Wat. It took a little over a month, and in the end, I did not win any sort of ribbon, nor did anyone have a clue as to what Angkor Wat was. :/
http://www.romanticasheville.com/gingerbread.htm
If you are anywhere in the area between November and January it is worth your time.
http://peakdefinition.smugmug.com/Events/652711
http://www.jdrfnorthwest.org/gingerbread/
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=gingerbread&w=45206671%40N00
Mount Rainier is definitely outside-the-box.
Ha ha Poptarts. I used to eat those. Great idea. Some even are already frosted!
Now, I wonder what happens in the end; when display time is up? Everyone gets to "eat house"? Demolition with a giant Gobstopper wrecking ball?
Just give it a Splat!
So, I took the chicken route and tossed the gingerbread 'glop', baked up some pumkin-rum cake, cut out cubes and thin(1" thick)squares for the roofs, trimmed off some of the cubes so the two sides of the roof would fit, frosted and decorated each "gingerbread" house with different candies.
They were a hit! So, I made them agin, this year. Hmm...tradition starting to bloom?
This link gives instructions (with pictures).
--Dean
http://picasaweb.google.com/deanpomerleau/FoolproofGingerbreadHouse?feat=directlink
Everything is built to scale as if it were an actual house.