This is the striking (and huge) Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea. It’s a 330-metre-tall pyramid-shaped building with 3,000 rooms, and was supposed to have 7 revolving restaurants, except they never actually finished it. Wikipedia says:

newspapers estimated the cost of construction was $750 million – 2% of North Korea’s GDP – and it is generally assumed construction came to a halt in 1992 due to lack of funding, acute electricity shortages, and the prevailing famine.

The building itself is complete, however it has no windows, fixtures or fittings – which makes it officially the world’s Tallest Unoccupied Building! In fact, it’s the tallest building by far in North Korea, the 18th tallest building in the entire world, and if it were ever to be completed, would be the world’s tallest hotel. Here’s a picture which really gives you a great impression of scale.

Thanks to Keith T, Soren Ragsdale, Josh Weinberg, zmaster and Jon Gaspar.

In our never-ending quest to catalogue everything that stakes its claim to being the “world’s largest something” I present to you the world’s largest dry dock.

Located in Belfast’s Docklands (where the ill-fated RMS Titanic was built) the dry dock is part of the Harland & Wolff Shipyard who also operate the two gigantic yellow cranes, Samson & Goliath. UK readers might recognise the area from a BBC ident that showed skateboarders doing tricks underneath the cranes.

To the west is the ferry terminal where you can see a Stenna Line Ferry which operates between here and Stranraer in Scotland. Submitter Chris had this to say:

This ferry is possibly the Stena Caledonia which crosses in 3 hours 15 minutes. The newer high speed Stena Voyager (HSS) also travels this route taking 105 minutes for the trip.

Thanks: redstar1 & Chris

G J Oliver’s Industrial Steel factory has a collection of unusual pets in the back garden; giant Steel Dinosaurs. Under the order of Mr Oliver himself the prehistoric creatures are created in spare moments by company employee Woody Hauser, who bases the design on rubber dinosaurs provided by his boss.

So far the collection is made up of a T-Rex to the East, a Apatosaurus (the correct name for what we like to call Brontosauruses) to the West and between them, just a little to the North, a caveman. (These ground level photos also show a Triceratops somewhere in the area, but I can’t spot it in the satellite pic).

The models take about 6-9 months each to design and build yet Mr. Hauser is expecting to continue production for as long as there’s slow days at work.

Thanks: Alex

Someone has written Beef it up using hay bales in this field near Newport, Wales. Promotion for their other product perhaps?

Thanks to matt.

As a follow up to yesterday’s fabulous elephant shadow, here’s an equally cool giraffe shadow in Oakland zoo! I think these are ace

Thanks to Paul LaVigne and Vladimir Vysotsky.