Aircraft factories are gargantuan, complicated and interesting.The Boeing Everett factory, where the Jumbo Jet was built and the Dreamliner is being built is the largest volume building in the world. It has a floor plan of 100 acres, enough to fit more than a thousand family houses inside, with doors that are the size of football pitches.Included alongside Everett are a variety of factory shots of famous planes from Concorde to the Virgin Galactic space craft, the Blackbird and the B2.The shots of wartime assembly lines, which churned out aircraft at a rate associated with car assembly in environments that look like computer rendering from video games lines, include the famous secret factory at Burbank which was hidden under a fake hillside.

Fixed-gear bicycles, without gears or brakes were created for the controlled environment of a velodrome. This environment could not be more different from hilly San Francisco or car ridden New York, but their appeal as being both stripped down and minimalist as well as requiring considerable risk and commitment to learn to ride has made them fashionable in hip neighborhoods of large cities, such as New York's Williamsburg.This has lead to an interesting morphing of a classic post-war track bike design, to city fixies which inevitable become like beefier road bikes to be ridable and more recently to celebrity endorsed and/or fashion branded, limited edition products.The stunningly beautiful 1950's Cinelli, Italian team bike, best represents the classic track bike and the solid titanium saddle and merlin frame captures the road-bike-in-denial urban fixie (albeit, without the current vogue of sawn off straight handle-bars). The fashion house branded versions include graffiti artist, Futura's Colnago track frame, a Kid Robot bike a Fuji and Obey fixie and the surprisingly nice Nike AF1. The fashion bikes are particularly odd, because they are created by designers rather than bike enthusiasts and mix and match components purely on the basis of how they look. In this sense the transition of fixies from track to urban messenger to fashion designer is a continuous trend away from ergonomics to superficiality.Vote for your faves, ours is the 59 Cinelli.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then Apple is getting it in spades.For those that worry about Apple blazing a trail for others to copy less expensively, its not that simple. A product like the iPhone is heavily tooled rather than fabricated. The hole for the headphones is actually drilled. To do this, Apple have hogged the world's supply of the type of high tech, multi-dimensional machine tool needed.While companies like Nokia may copy, they may not be able to get the same build quality, even if they want to. Vote on the most blatant copy and post tips in the comments.

Proving that expressions like point and shoot are not just mere metaphor. Here are some examples in the history of camera design that have lead for one reason or another to items which look exactly like guns, from early experimental cameras to sniper style Paparazzi kit to toys.

Gym equipment has a habit of making people look stupid, like that weird guy on TV with the pony tail and the abs machine. These machines are the zenith of fitness absurdity - teaching you to swim on dry land, anywhere. Handy if you are an Olympic swimmer holed up in a hotel room, waiting to be airlifted into Beijing when the smog clears.

Some machines that punch, stamp, strike or print money. What everyone needs these days, and what central banks will be using a lot of. You may be amused to find out that even the J-98 Bank Note printing press is made in China.

For sheer baroque complexity of appearance, planetarium projectors are among the most amazing gizmos ever built. They range from enormous machines more than 20 ft. high to a soccer ball sized $300 home version.Their purpose is a bizarre reversal of a large optical telescope, taking an internal view of the the universe and projecting it on a dome, rather than creating a view from peering outside of one, but the aesthetic is somewhat similar. Another curious similarity is how much they look like some early satellites.Our personal favorites are the original Zeiss, Mark I and the truly amazing machine built by the Korkosz brothers for the, appropriately named, Seymour Planetarium.

A Sky Hook is an impossible item that interns were traditionally sent out to buy , as a prank. These eight flying cranes, seven helicopters and one blimp, are as close to reality as sky hooks can get. The blimp proposal is actually named the Sky Hook.

As gas prices increase so do oil profits and expensive kitsch. There is a correlation between increase money made from carbon deposits such as oil and the availability of horrible diamond or Swarovski encrusted objects. One form of carbon (oil) is swapped for another (diamonds), in exchange for silver (money). Damien Hirsts $100 Million diamond skull doesnt make this chart on account of its priceless irony. Similar lists have been done by others, but we couldnt resist an updated version.

Included here are regular freeway loads over 100ft in length, which you would probably not want to get stuck behind. However, our favorites are the unbelievably large coker oven trailers which have 160 wheels each, and the specialized boeing transporter, with its secondary cab beneath the trailer, at road level.

Here is a collection of lamps, lights and chandeliers made from everything from car parts, umbrellas, bicycles, tableware, old globes, tape measures and speaker parts.Hopefully this will whet your creative appetite.

At first glance you think, wow a tie camera, a camera in a case, mirror, plant, cigarette packet, cell phone. How cool would that have been when I was a kid? Then you think, hmm …cell phone. Cell phones already have cameras, its a pretty dumb place to put a spy cam.The progress of technology has overtaken the mystique of the hidden camera such that we have been invaded by a million spy cams embedded in wholesale crap.Vote for the silliest. Oh, and do check out the rather great antique watch camera which is from the days when spy cams were actually impressive.

Manikins (the alternate spelling, mannequin, is usually used for the store window variety) which are used for medical training are extremely interesting devices with accurate and working anatomical elements. This list is larger than usual since the number of interesting items meant that we kept on looking.

A collection of ‘personal helicopters' and flying machines.As the T-shirt says - 'the is is the future, where is my Jetpack'. It seems that Jetpacks are basically dangerous, and since the appearance at the Los Angeles Olympics, nothing much has happened. Still, there are two manufacturers that will actually build one for you, for $250,000, and you can buy a glorified fan that will propel you on an ice rink at the same speed as a puck.If you want rotor blades rather than rockets, the current options are a bit cheaper and more practical, but are still less cool than the Soviet Fold-up helicopter, from the Cold War era.

This is a list of the worlds most beautiful airport terminals, based upon architectural merit rather than crude size, high tech bravado or structural gymnastics. For that reason the beautifully simple Dalaman terminal in Turkey makes the list, for example, but the design compromised Heathrow Terminal Five, does not. Vote for your faves.

The first in a two part list. Here are a series of strange and unusual bus stops, including those with domestic or air conditioned interiors, odd structures and a variety of innovative integral advertising.

The name Chrysler will be remembered if no other car is produced, in the automobile inspired skyscraper that is the pinnacle of American machine-age design.The Chrysler building is the tallest brick (steel re-enforced) building in the world but it is fundamentally modern, a triumph of both technology and design. Steel gargoyles were modeled on 1929 Chrysler automobile hood decorations and radiator caps and the earliest stainless steel cladding covered the stepped, Thai Princess-like crown. The Chrysler's spire was unveiled in less than an hour, to make it the tallest building in the world and the first the first structure more than 1000ft high.Here are a selection of iconic views and details of the Chrysler, what I believe is America's most important building, and an important milestone in the history of technology.

What digital cameras have the largest zoom? Three new non-SLR cameras were announced in September, with 18x Optical Zooms, here they are along with their nearest rivals.The optical zoom on a camera of a type that you can easily carry around most of the time, seems like the single most important feature, since all other principal features, like megapixels, seem to have maxed out.Our task is specific. Photographing ‘architectural details on buildings in New York'. (We can't be bothered to schlep around 15 lenses, but want to capture details, without a ladder). However, a good zoom is what you really need for most photographic tasks.Three new non-SLR cameras with 18x Optical zoom, have been announced recently. They look like the ones to beat: The Panasonic DMC FZ18, Olympus SP-560 UZ and Fujifilm Finepix S8000fd.