Here we have 12 most spectacular natural and manmade holes in the face of the earth. Some of these are the result of man's search for mineral wealth, while some are nature's work creating some astounding holes. 

Darvaza - The Burning Gates:
In 1971, geologists discovered a huge underground deposit of natural gas on this site. And while excavating, a whole drilling rig fell into an underground cavern. Natural gas started coming up from the hole. To prevent gasses from escaping, it was set alight and it continues to burn even today. The crater measures roughly 60 meters in diameter and 20 meters deep and is located inTurkmenistan. 

Image credit: JohnHBradley. 

Kimberley Diamond Mine (Big Hole) - South Africa:
The Kimberley Diamond Mine (also known as the Big Hole) is an open-pit mine in Kimberley, South Africa and is claimed to be the largest hole excavated by hand. This 1097 meter deep mine yielded over 6,000 lb of diamonds before being closed in 1914.
Monticello Dam - California: 

Located in northern California, the Monticello Dam's is the largest in the world. This funnel-shaped outlet, allows water to bypass the dam when it reaches capacity, as it allows water to pass through at a rate of 48,400 cubic feet per second.
Image credit: fogonazos.
Bingham Canyon Mine:
Kennecott Copper's Bingham Canyon Mine is the world's largest open pit mine or to say the world's largest man-made structure. This open-faced mine is the largest man-made excavation on earth, stretching two-and-a-half miles wide and 3,960 feet deep.
The World's Deepest Water-Filled Sinkhole - El Zacatón Cenote:
Cenote Zacaton, near the northeastern coast of Mexico, is the deepest known water-filled sinkhole in the world. The bottom of the world's deepest sinkhole is found at 318 meters below surface. It was discovered with the help of a robotic vehicle designed for underwater exploration by the National Aeronautic Space Agency.
Mirny Diamond Mine - Siberia: 
The Mirny Diamond Mine holds the title of the largest open diamond mine in the world. Its 525m deep and has a diameter of 1200m, and there is a no-fly zone above the hole as a few helicopters got sucked in.
This truck loader is one of the biggest in the world - length 13.36 meters, width 7.78 meters & height 6.65 meters.
The huge machine refered above appears just a small point in this image.

Diavik Mine - Canada: 

The Diavik Diamond Mine is about 300 kilometers (186 miles) north of Yellowknife in Canada. It produces 8 million carats (3,500 lb) of diamonds annually. It is connected by an ice road and has its own airport with a runway large enough to accommodate Boeing 737 jet aircraft.
Image credit: wikipediaImage credit: stumbles.

Sinkhole-Guatemala: 
In 2007, a 300-foot-deep sinkhole swallowed about a dozen homes in Guatemala City.
Image credit: studentshangout.
Image credit: nationalgeographic.

Here we have cool art where rice fields are transformed into creative works of art. 
Its been created in rice fields by perfect planning & well laid out plan which includes planting different types of rice. Its from Japan were red rice are used with the regular rice to form these special patterns. The design has to be meticulous as the planting has to be done on the right time to get the overall effect of the artwork. The results are nothing less than marvelous. Check out these pictures!































Source: Vill via Hemmy.

Google Inc. was incorporated as a privately held company in September 1998 and they had their IPO in August 2004. They have been the largest search engine company since then. It is estimated that Google runs over 1 million servers in data centers across the world and processes over one billion search requests per day. Whether we like it or not, we depend on Google and they depend on us. Here are some interesting facts that you may not know about the company.

Google Used To Be Named BackRub

When Google was formed, the founders accidentally misspelled the word “googol,” which is a word that refers to the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes. The word “googol” was chosen because the goal of the company was to organize massive amounts of information. In an article from the BusinessInsider earlier this month, we learned that Google co-founder and current CEO Larry Page was obsessed with the number googol even while attending East Lansing High School in Michigan. The original name of Google was BackRub, but they renamed it to Google in 1997.

Google Is Minimal Because The Founders Did Not Know HTML Back Then

Google’s homepage has been known for its simplicity. The simplicity and minimal design is one of the major reasons why Google became more popular than their competitors like MSN, Yahoo!, and AltaVista. The minimal design was actually created because of the limited knowledge that Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had of HTML. As a matter of fact, there was not even a “submit” button on the homepage at first. Users had to hit the “return” key to see Google search results.

Google’s First Doodle

Google’s first homepage “Doodle” are very well known. Each doodle represents a significant event for a given day. For example, the Google doodle may have eggs used as the O’s in the word “Google” on Easter Sunday. The first “Google doodle” had a picture of a man with his arms sticking up. This was used during the weekend Larry and Sergey took the weekend off to go to the Burning Man festival in NEvada. The Burning Man was added to the homepage to let users know they were out of the office and couldn’t fix technical issues like a server crash that weekend.

I’m Feeling Lucky

Google users almost never use the “I’m feeling lucky” button, but trials of removing the button made people feel uncomfortable. People did not like seeing the button removed.

Google IPO: $2,718,281,828

When Google filed their form S-1 registration statement, they wrote the proposed maximum aggregate offering price at $2,718,281,828. That is a very specific number. How did Google come up with it? That number happens to be the first ten digits of the math constant e. You can tell that even when the founders were getting ready to take their company to the next level, they still had a sense of nerdy, yet witty sense of humor.

Google Storage (LEGO)

In 1998 when Larry Page and Sergey Brin were PhD students at Stanford, they were working on the Digital Library Project. They needed a large amount of disk space to test the PageRank algorithm on world wide web data. At the time of their research, the largest hard drive sizes were 4 gigabytes so they assembled 10 of them into a low-cost cabinet made out of Lego. Two years later, the company had 5,000 PCs for searching and web crawling using LINUX.

Andy Bechtolsheim

The first major investor in Google was Andy Bechtolsheim. Bechtolsheim was one of the founders in Sun Microsystems. He wrote Sergey and Larry a $100,000 check after seeing a quick demo on the porch of a Stanford faculty member’s house in Palo Alto. The check was written to Google Inc. Google was not a legal entity at that point and so the check sat in Larry’s desk drawer for two weeks while he and Brin quickly rushed to set up a corporation and find other investors.

YouTube Deal At Denny’s

The $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube took place in one week. YouTube co-founder Steve Chen met with executives at both Google and Yahoo! They did not want to meet at offices so they decided to meet over mozzarella sticks at Denny’s in Palo Alto. Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang came to one of those meetings. Google ended up outbidding Yahoo! for YouTube.

Google Goats

Google rents goats from a company called California Grazing. The goats help Google cut down on the amount of weed at the Google headquarters. Google rents 200 goats plus the herder and a border collie to cut the weeds. Google said it is “a lot cuter to watch than lawn mowers.”

Larry and Sergey Wanted Steve Jobs As CEO In 2000

Back in 2000, Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to hire Steve Jobs as the company CEO before deciding to go with Eric Schmidt. Google’s investors said that they needed supervision with an experienced CEO. Jobs was too busy building the iPod at Apple at the time though. Eventually John Doerr convinced the two to hire former Novell CEO Eric Schmidt.

Source: http://pulse2.com/2012/05/01/google-facts/