Man Walks All Day to Create Spectacular Snow Patterns

http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/simon-beck-snow-art

by ColinWright • 14 years ago

168 25 14 years ago

vijayr• 14 years ago

Unbelievable, especially considering that it is going to be short lived. Similar but more elaborate - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ga5s_qYgJS8 They destroy it at the end :(

jh3• 14 years ago

I bet this guy can make a mean snow angel.

Seriously though, these are amazing. I sometimes have problems drawing a "perfect" square without a ruler...

hanula• 14 years ago

Crazy man ;) Great to see people like that and sometimes to take some of the positive craziness with you. This made my day.

Tichy• 14 years ago

How did he manage to walk with such precision? Assuming it isn't just photoshop.

marshray3• 14 years ago

He's a true hacker and a craftsman.

He seems to have a lot of practice and hours to line things up for each one. They don't look perfect. Maybe he just does it by eye? GPS?

peterhajas• 14 years ago

A "hacker"? He makes art in the snow.

duck• 14 years ago

From his FB page[1]:

Most of this activity takes place in the ski resort of Les Arcs, where I own an apartment and spend most of the winter.

On average they take about 10 hours to really do it properly, some are a little unfinished, if my feet get cold or hurt too much.

The setting out is done using handheld orienteering compass and distance determination using pace counting or measuring tape. Curves are either judged or arcs of circle using a clothes line attached to an anchor at the centre

Designs are chosen from the world of geometry or "crop circles". Some are named eg Mandelbrot set, Koch curve, Sierpinski triangle are 3 of my favorites.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/snowart8848?sk=info

callmeed• 14 years ago

Also see Jim Denevan for sand versions: http://jimdenevan.com/

barrkel• 14 years ago

Evidence against extra-terrestrial origin for crop-circles, for the doubters.

Yver• 14 years ago

Nice try, anal-probing aliens, but you can't fool me. I'm onto you.

rorrr• 14 years ago

Why is this shit on Hacker News? This is not reddit. This is not even new.

Flagged.

adventured• 14 years ago

It's on Hacker News because I find it interesting and it was new to me. Up voted.

fayden• 14 years ago

rorrr's message is unnecessarily rude, but I don't think he's wrong.

It's a very interesting feat, but it's just a showcase of his realizations, unrelated to computers or science. His thought process or his planning for making such patterns would probably fit here more than this post.

I don't think it's a problem either, because such posts are rare, but I would be disappointed if Hacker News was filled with this kind of post.

greggman• 14 years ago

It seems like it would be really run the try to repo this with robots.

hkmurakami• 14 years ago

Figuring out the shortest path to completing these patterns might be a fun challenge.

DennisP• 14 years ago

I was thinking more along the lines of the most compressible path...ie., the shortest set of instructions that can produce the pattern. Sort of like knitting patterns, "knit one, pearl two." It seems like he must be figuring out some reasonably simple step sequences to make it all work.

lostlogin• 14 years ago

I'm wiling to bet you could, and for a lot of money. If you did have the above mentioned robot to make it a push-button exercise, I'm pretty sure that there would be farmers on with prominent fields near motorway and tourist site willing. It's almost green advertising, 100% biodegradable and with a reusable robot. No. Nothing is sacred.

franze• 14 years ago

sadly if you visit this url via ipad all you get is unreadable/unuseable swipeware.

catshirt• 14 years ago

my friends and i did a pretty decent scale mario in college [0]. it got decent coverage and was actually pretty cool. that said... these obviously blow mine out of the water. :)

[0] http://www.njit.edu/features/sceneandheard/mariointhesnow.ph...

edit: did i really call it "great fun"? everyone do me a favor and skip the text.

readme• 14 years ago

Government coverup! Definitely created by extraterrestrials who know trigonometry.

Man Walks All Day to Create Spectacular Snow Patterns

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