Somebody sent me this picture in an e-mail, but they weren’t sure where it came from. It looks like a zoo, possibly in Asia, where visitors are allowed to feed bears with little fishing poles. Does anyone know the story behind this picture?

Guess they ran out of scary dogs?

A brief excerpt on these awesome houses from the United Nations, which designated them as a World Heritage Site:

Kaiping Diaolou and Villages feature the Diaolou, multi-storeyed defensive village houses in Kaiping, which display a complex and flamboyant fusion of Chinese and Western structural and decorative forms. They reflect the significant role of émigré Kaiping people in the development of several countries in South Asia, Australasia and North America, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There are four groups of Diaolou and twenty of the most symbolic ones are inscribed on the List. These buildings take three forms: communal towers built by several families and used as temporary refuge, residential towers built by individual rich families and used as fortified residences, and watch towers. Built of stone, pise, brick or concrete, these buildings represent a complex and confident fusion between Chinese and Western architectural styles. Retaining a harmonious relationship with the surrounding landscape, the Diaolou testify to the final flowering of local building traditions that started in the Ming period in response to local banditry.

Photos below:

If you were following international news earlier this summer, you may have heard about the heavy rains that brought about massive flooding throughout China. The floods killed over 500 people and forced over 1.4 million others to evacuate their homes, inflicting billions of dollars worth of damage. It certainly sounds terrible when you read an article about it, but to get a real picture of the scale of this flooding one most certainly has to look at images.

Here are 35 of the most shocking and dramatic news photographs from the 2007 Chinese floods:

Just got this huge set of photographs via e-mail, most of which were taken at robot expos in China over the last few years. I cannot identify any of these robots, and I am also unsure if they are all of Chinese origin. Anybody out there an expert on Chinese robotics?

What were your favorites? I’d have to say either the sword robot or that old man clone. [HOMO Friend is pretty cool too.]

WARNING: If seeing a fish cut open is offensive to you, don’t scroll down to the bottom of this post!