Although it appears to be one of the scariest sports in the modern world, land sailing (or land yachting) has apparently caught on in a big way on this beach in Malo Les Bains, near Dunkirk, France.

The premise is essentially the same as water sailing – except there are wheels, speeds of up to 70mph, and a harder surface to fall on! Participants sit or lie in a kayak shaped hull, and use pedals or levers to control the sail. Ironically, right next to the water appears to be the best place to do this!

There are multiple size classes, with the most powerful being Class 2 (which boast 8 metre sails), progressively getting smaller and less powerful.

Also hoping to take advantage of the favourable wind conditions are some kite buggies. These are similar to land yachts, but using a power-kite to propel you along the ground, instead of a sail, and can also reach speeds of 70mph.

For more on parasailing, check out Wikipedia, as well as the Dunkirk landsailing club’s website, where there are plenty of photos!

Thanks: James

Clearly visible thanks to an enormous shadow, this huge saw in Tokyo looks to be attempting to cut the city in half.

Unfortunately it seems that the person using it has gotten off to a slow start, and must have nipped off for some noodles and a bit of a sit down.

From this ground-level photo you can see that this giant saw really is very big, but also that it’s actually a western-style plain-toothed Crosscut saw, and not a Japanese saw, or “nokogiri”. I wonder why?

Update: Ron Vogel points out that this is actually “Saw, Sawing”, a sculpture by the excellent public artist Claes Oldenburg, whose other works Spoonbridge and Cherry and Dropped Cone have been featured on GSS in the past. Ron also found a kml collection of all of the works by Claes and his wife Coosje van Bruggen, which is well worth checking out.

Thanks to Things in Jars.

As 2007 draws to a close we present our choices for the best posts of the year.

Best Mystery

There were numerous contenders for the most confusing or bizarre images, but our pick is the Mystery Plane Outline, as even the generally accepted answer, that these are small rocks arranged in the shape of a plane, still begs the question: “But why bother?”.

Best personal project

In February we were impressed with one man’s attempt to single-handedly recreate a cruise ship in his front drive.

Lamest World Record

The Largest Wooden ship in the world from April easily wins this prize, due to having a less-than-exciting title and the fact that the specially built ship has never even been in the water!

A special mention also goes to the German towns squabbling over who has the most unintentionally leaning building.

Our Brains Hurt Award

Getting our heads around the Island and Lake recursion from September’s Island Week 2 was almost too much, but I think we get it now…

Best Smallest Thing

We loved the idea of the world’s smallest parks from January, but the world’s smallest municipal park was just too darn small to see from satellite! Fortunately, Google now have a street view shot of it.

Best World’s Most Enlarged Thing

In the last year we’ve featured many, many sights that claim to be the “World’s largest something” but our pick for the Best Largest something is the World’s largest fingerprint.

Best Imagery

Undoubtedly the most amazing images to be found in Google Earth are the African Megaflyover project aerial shots, and the best of these images were highlighted in November’s Google Sightseeing Safari.

Best Blurry Pictures

Some of the aerial images in Google Earth are amazingly high resolution, but not high enough for our tour of miniature parks across the globe, which ended up as a list of blurry blobs that sort-of look like the Eiffel tower.

Best Landart

The ancient Incan geoglyph of a cat is fantastic, and much more intersting and attractive than kfc’s logo stunt.

Most Ignored Warning

A few days after we posted this year’s April fools joke: “Live Satellite Images in Google Earth” we updated the entry with a banner warning users that it was a prank and there are no live images to be seen. Did anyone read that? Of course not! We still get a new message almost every week from someone who fell for the joke and wants to know where the live images are.

Most In-Depth Post

For a long time it had no decent imagery, so during Island Week this year we really went to town on our Easter Island post, and managed to condense 2,000 years of history into a mere 600 words.

Best Large Type

The rooftop message “Welcome to Cleveland” isn’t very interesting at first glance, until you realise that the message is over 400 miles away in Milwaukee!

So that’s our picks of the year, but with over 250 entries in 2007, what were your favourites?

Wishing you all a happy and prosperous 2008 – see you all next year!

Built on the site of the 1988 Glasgow Garden Festival, the Glasgow Science Centre is a purpose-built facility featuring three floors dedicated to hands-on science in action. Taking the form of a huge, gleaming, titanium crescent overlooking the Clyde, the building is also home to the best-equipped planetarium in the UK.

As if that wasn’t enough, just to the south we can see the silver dome of Scotland’s only IMAX cinema¹, which has a screen larger than a 5-a-side football pitch, and a 12,000-watt digital sound system.

Most impressive of all from up here however, is the 127 metre-tall Glasgow Tower. This is the tallest floored building in Scotland, and the tallest building in the world which can rotate through a full 360 degrees!

Technically the tower is actually an aerofoil (like an aeroplane wing stood on one end), which is rotated into the wind by computers – allowing it to be exceptionally slim for its height. Impressive stuff, and I hear the views are not bad too.

Thanks to Martin Deutsch. More about the Glasgow Science Centre, the Glasgow Tower and the IMAX film format at, you guessed it, Wikipedia.

The 230.68 metre (757 foot) tall Warsaw Palace of Culture and Science is the tallest building in Poland and the 187th tallest building in the world. Completed in 1955, the design of the building is of course in the Stalinist architectural style, and very similar to the previously featured Moscow State University¹.

The palace was actually a gift from Joseph Stalin to the people of Warsaw, and it’s said that when he offered the people the option of either a metro system, or the palace – the people chose a metro. So naturally Stalin gave them this palace.

Warsovians apparently hated this huge building, both in terms of design and political symbolism. Since Soviet domination over Poland ended in 1989 however, most of Warsaw’s residents have come to accept it as an important and integral part of their skyline.

More at Wikipedia and at the official site.

Thanks to Alexandra, Maciej Godlewski, Hubert Grzywacz, Yano and Max.