Morning Linkage (Sept 21)

Transport

2010 — Ducati brings us a Hypermotard. (Which BTW is a completely
sil­ly made up word.) Is this pic­ture for real? Or did they just grab
what­ev­er looked kin­da like…

On a small­er scale — here’s a run­ning repli­ca of the Honda 50.
(lim­it­ed edi­tion of course.) Still cute as heck.

For our youngest read­ers. (Surely we can build one of these.) The
coolest rock­ing horse ever.

Broken bikes suck. Hanging around wait­ing for the sag-wagon is boring.
Just ask these guys.

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Technology

A rip­tide of data flows through the live on-air cov­er­age of most
sports today, Sandbox8 gives us a look behind the scenes at how
hun­dreds of vol­un­teers and a cou­ple of pro­fes­sion­als put togeth­er the
stats cov­er­age for a PGA event. Golf nutz — I’ll nev­er under­stand ’em.

A much more scenic use of imag­ing tech­nol­o­gy brings us pic­tures of
glac­i­ers from space. Damn we live on a pret­ty planet.

An aging pop­u­la­tion has health care in Japan stretched thin. A nursing
short­age makes rou­tine care par­tic­u­lar­ly dif­fi­cult. One answer is to
sup­ple­ment skilled care with robots to han­dle the heavy lift­ing (if
you will.) I’m find­ing the increas­ing empha­sis on replac­ing human
inter­ac­tion with robot­ic assis­tance unsettling.

Riba is cute and cud­dly and can lift a 135 pound patient.

Regina is not cud­dly and cute but can lift much heav­ier patients.
Up to 440 pounds.

A trans­former bed that can elim­i­nate the need to lift patients
alto­geth­er. (This one is hopeful.)

Another cute robot. This one leads the elder­ly in a series of exercises.

OTOH robots may save the adult enter­tain­ment indus­try. (Really?) SFW

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Images

Enough with the zom­bie machines — how about some zom­bie peanuts?

Curiosity kills the cat — in nine quirky ways. SFW

How to get a pho­to­graph of a bat tak­ing a drink from a pond. It’s hard.

I had night­mares about maraud­ing bears last night. Maybe I’ll download
one of these sets of ani­mal illus­tra­tions as desk­top wallpaper.
Abstract sur­faces and nice colors.

Or maybe I’ll just go straight to this pac­man destroys your city
car­toon wall­pa­per. The artist describes it as cheer­ful chaos.

Remake/Remodel is Warren Ellis’ chal­lenge to car­toon­ist to take an old
for­got­ten com­ic char­ac­ter and re-imagine them for the 21st century.
Recently he’s called out Black Orchid. Here are three fab­u­lous entries.
SFW. (Click through to the forum thread at your own peril.)

hap­py bloody mon­day crew,